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38p William ^etoett Cttcfcer, £)♦£>. 



PERSONAL POWER. Counsels to College 
Men. Crown 8vo, $1.50 net. Postage extra. 

THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE 
PREACHER. Lectures on the Lyman Beecher 
Foundation, Yale University, 1898. i2mo, gilt 
top, $1.50. 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
Boston and New York 



PERSONAL POWER 



PERSONAL POWER 



Counsels to College Jften 



Br 



WILLIAM JEWETT TUCKER 




fmmmmB. 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

<$fce $itoer#Dc pre$* Cambrioge 

1910 






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COPYRIGHT, I91O, BY WILLIAM JEWETT TUCKER 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



Published March jqio 



©C!.A?^6J020 



PREFACE 

Among our social institutions the college stands 
by common consent for the quickening of per- 
sonal power. Incidentally the same end is reached 
through various agencies, as notably through 
the competition of business, but no business ex- 
ists for this purpose. Every college does exist 
chiefly for this purpose. The burden which so- 
ciety thus lays upon the college is not only 
greater than appears, it is also an increasing 
burden. It is becoming more and more a neces- 
sity to awaken the consciousness of power, as 
well as to utilize and direct it. The inference 
can no longer be drawn that the college is the 
first goal of the ambitious youth. Owing to the 
more relaxed and less stimulating life in many 
homes, not a few of those who are sent to college 
find there the first chance for mental or moral 
quickening which they have known. Many others 
need to have their sense of power deepened and 
steadied ; while others still are ready for the wise 
but urgent incentive to the right use of personal 
power. Doubtless it is necessary, and perhaps it 
is fair, that this increasing burden should fall 



vi PREFACE 

upon the college, for if not upon the college, 
upon what? Who or what shall assume the re- 
sponsibility for the very considerable amount of 
intelligent but unquickened life in a prosperous 
democracy? If the colleges were to consider only 
their scholastic interests they would ignore alto- 
gether this phase of modern social life. The col- 
lege would be the home for the time being of the 
scholar pure and simple. But within those limits 
of scholarship which must at all cost be main- 
tained, the college, like the more responsible in- 
dividual, may be expected to attend to its social 
duty. 

The method of discharging this social obliga- 
tion, of quickening, that is, the sense of per- 
sonal power in the average college student, is 
one of the most perplexing questions of college 
administration. Difficult as it is to provide the 
means and facilities for instruction, it is still more 
difficult to insure the moral supports of instruc- 
tion. The intellectual impulse is seldom sufficient 
for the proper demands of the intellectual life. 
The rightly adjusted will and the fit motive are 
essential elements in the intellectual growth of 
the college man. Furthermore it must be con- 
sidered that the process of moral education in 
our colleges is very largely that of the education 
of the individual through the mass, a slow, hard, 



PREFACE vii 

and often unsatisfying process, but one for which 
there is no equivalent, and for which there can 
be no substitute. The average student will not be 
made better except by the use of such motives 
and influences as are able to lift the whole body 
of which he is a part. College sentiment is the 
most potent influence for good or ill to which 
one is exposed during the period of college resi- 
dence. College men are very human, more so 
than other men of their age, because they live 
in an intensely human environment. It therefore 
pays morally to work for years, if need be, to 
eradicate bad traditions or customs, to elevate 
standards, to create a sentiment which is vital 
enough to be aggressive. But whether the appeal 
be made to the individual through the mass, or 
directly, the ground of the appeal is personal 
power, implied or in part realized. The awaken- 
ing or quickening of the sense of personal power 
is on the whole the greatest safeguard against 
the risks of college life. The temptations of the 
flesh and of the mind usually grow less as the 
sense of power increases, for with the increase 
of the sense of power there comes the sense of 
responsibility, and the sense of responsibility 
often becomes the stepping-stone to some gener- 
ous consecration. The moral equipment of a col- 
lege is made up almost necessarily of motives 



viii PREFACE 

and incentives addressed to the latent or partially 
developed consciousness of personal power. 

The Sunday vesper service in Rollins Chapel 
at Dartmouth gave me while president of the 
college the unusual opportunity of attempting 
to supply to some degree what I have called the 
moral supports of instruction. The appeal to the 
consciousness of personal power was seldom taken 
directly, hut it was always implied. The service 
allowed a very wide range of subject, and an en- 
tirely informal habit of speech. But the principle 
there made use of so far approved itself to my 
judgment that I did not hesitate to transfer it 
to more formal occasional addresses or sermons, 
some of which have been gathered up into the 
present volume. The local allusions, which were 
made chiefly in the addresses, have been allowed 
to remain, as they were such as to furnish the 
setting natural to any college. The volume itself 
may be simply an afterword to graduates of the 
last decade here or elsewhere; it may also be a 
new word to some among the undergraduates of 
to-day. 

William Jewett Tuckee. 

Hanover, N. H. February, 1910. 



CONTENTS 

I 

PROVISIONAL SELF-GOVERNMENT 3 

Ephesians iv, 13 
"Until we come . . . unto a perfect man." 

II 

THE ESTIMATION OF POWER 15 

2 Samuel xxiii, 16 

" And the three mighty men brake through the host 
of the Philistines, and drew water out of the well of 
Beth-lehem, that was by the gate, and took it, and 
brought it to David : nevertheless he would not drink 
thereof, but poured it out unto the Lord." 

Ill 

WISDOM THE PRINCIPAL THING 31 

Proverbs iv, 7 

" Wisdom is the principal thing : therefore get wis- 
dom : yea with all thy getting get understanding." 

IV 

THE UNEARNED INCREMENT IN MODERN LIFE . . 45 

Luke xix, 26 

"I say unto you, That unto every one which hath 
shall be given." 



x CONTENTS 

V 

PROFESSIONAL VALUES 64 

Acts x, 15 

" And the voice spake unto him again the second time, 
What God hath cleansed, call not thou common." 

VI 

THE DISTRIBUTION OF PERSONAL POWER .... 81 
Matthew x, 8 
" Freely ye have received, freely give." 

VII 

A MAN'S SOUL AND HIS WORLD 97 

Matthew xvi, 26 

" What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole 
world, and lose his own soul ? " 

VIII 

THE CAPACITY FOR THE TRUE 114 

1 John ii, 8 
"Which thing is true in him and in you." 

IX 

THE MORALLY WELL-BRED MAN 129 

Micah vi, 8 

" He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good ; and 
what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, 
and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy 
God ? " 



CONTENTS xi 



MORAL MATURITY 144 

Matthew vii, 12 

" Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, 
even so do ye also to them : for this is the law and 
the prophets." 

XI 

THE SATISFACTIONS OF LIFE IN THE MIDST OF ITS 
CONTRADICTIONS 164 

ECCLESIASTES iii, 11 

" He hath made everything beautiful in its time : also 
he hath set eternity in their heart, yet so that man 
cannot find out the work that God hath done from 
the beginning even to the end." 

XII 

SECOND USES OF MEN -THE RECOVERY OF PER- 
SONAL POWER 177 

Jeremiah xviii, 4 

" He made it again another vessel." 

THE MORAL TRAINING OF THE COLLEGE 
MAN 

Addresses at the Opening of Successive College 
Years 1905-1908. 

I. THE TRAINING OF THE GENTLEMAN . 195 

n. THE TRAINING OF THE SCHOLAR . . .212 

III. THE TRAINING OF THE CITIZEN ... 225 

IV. THE TRAINING OF THE ALTRUIST . . 240 



xii CONTENTS 

THE RELIGION OF THE EDUCATOR . . . 263 

Address in a Lenten Series on " Vocation and Reli- 
gion" at the Old South Church, Boston. 



PERSONAL POWER 



PERSONAL POWER 



PROVISIONAL SELF-GOVERNMENT 

" Until we come . . . unto a perfect man." — Ephesians iv, 13. 

In the discourse of Descartes upon " The Method 
of Using One's Reason Rightly/' a considerable 
part of which is autobiographical, he says that he 
had always had an intense desire to learn how to 
distinguish truth from falsehood, in order that 
he might be clear about his actions, and that he 
might be able to walk sure footedly in this life. 
But as he well knew, the quest after truth which 
would give this result was not a day's work, but 
rather a continuous and serious business. There- 
fore he resolved to set up what he termed " a pro- 
visional self-government," of which these were 
to be the rules. I give the rules as somewhat 
broadly paraphrased by Mr. Huxley : — 

First, that he would submit himself to the laws 
and religion in which he had been brought up ; 

Second, that he would act, on all occasions 
which called for action, promptly, and according 
to the best of his judgment ; 



4 PERSONAL POWER 

Third, that he would seek happiness in limiting 
his desires rather than in attempting to satisfy 
them; 

Fourth, that he would make the search after 
truth the business of his life. 

Descartes was just coming of age when he laid 
down for himself these rules of life. 

I borrow for present use this most suggestive 
term, — " Provisional Self-government," — not 
as the original and full interpretation of the 
Scripture from which we started, but as holding 
a part of the same substantial truth, namely, 
that the end and goal of our lives is not just at 
hand, but remote enough, according to God's 
spacing, for intervening search and endeavor and 
struggle. "Until we come." What shall we do 
meanwhile ? Organize ourselves, not only for the 
end, but for the means to the end. In this sense 
every man is to set up his provisional self-gov- 
ernment. 

If this then be our immediate concern, on what 
principles shall we organize our lives ? What in- 
terpretation shall we put upon life, each upon his 
own life, viewing it as a means to an end? I an- 
swer first, keeping still to the suggestion of the 
rules which I have quoted, that every man's life, 
viewed as a means to an end, is a faith. That is 
the chief part of our inheritance in the world. We 



PROVISIONAL SELF-GOVERNMENT 5 

are born into a world which has acquired the habit 
of looking forward. We look forward because of 
this habit of the world. The most beautiful, as 
it was the most awe-inspiring, figure of the old 
paganisms — they all had it — is the Sibyl, the 
spirit of prophecy. " In the crowded and familiar 
scene," as one has said, "of a then living and bus- 
tling paganism she is the devotee to the world's 
hereafter : consecrated to that idea and prospect, 
she gazes upon the last shore of time : and her 
sacred brow is lifted up above the throng of com- 
mon objects and concerns, that her eye may rest 
upon a mysterious distance and an unknown page 
of the future history of mankind." The spirit of 
prophecy was too fine a spirit for paganism to 
hold. It was continually slipping from its grasp, 
and with every slip there came the lapse of faith, 
and with the lapse of faith the loss of moral power. 
But the spirit of prophecy is the spirit of re- 
ligion, and when once it found a safe and sure 
home in Christianity the world began to acquire 
the habit of faith, — faith in God, then faith in 
man, and then faith in itself as the home of a 
redeemed humanity. And this world of acquired 
faith is our world. The generations of men, slow 
as they sometimes seem to be, do surely feel the 
pull of the future, as surely as the tides measure 
the pull from above. 



6 PERSONAL POWER 

Now in the judgment of Descartes every man 
who starts to think and reason for himself, even 
with the freedom of doubt, ought to keep within 
this order and movement of the world. As for 
himself, he would submit to the laws and religion 
in which he had been brought up. There was the 
place for him to do his thinking and his ques- 
tioning. 

I make this course definite and practical. Some 
of you have been brought up in a church ancient 
and venerable, the home of authority, which has 
witnessed many revolts from its order and faith, 
but which abides in power. Let no motive short 
of a perfectly assured religious advance lead you 
away. It is no advantage to religion, no advantage 
whatever to any opposing form of religion, that 
any one of you should cease to be a devout and 
loyal son of the Catholic Church. If you ever right- 
fully cease to be such it must be because of some 
growing demand of your spiritual nature. Many 
more of you have been brought up under vari- 
ous forms of the Protestant faith. The origins of 
your faith are not to be ignored. Through them 
you have been introduced into the common Chris- 
tianity. Keep the advantage of the possession of 
things which have become familiar and sacred. 
Leave them behind you only as you become sure 
that you are moving toward greater spiritual free- 



PROVISIONAL SELF-GOVERNMENT 7 

dom and power. Whatever may be the religious 
faith or the religious doubt of any one of you, 
do not break your connection with the habit of 
the world, that habit which gives it a future. 
This would be a sad world if, like the world of 
paganism, it should lose the spirit of prophecy. 

I answer again that every man's life, when viewed 
as a means to an end, is a series of actions. Ac- 
tivity is not action. Activity is not a necessary 
means to an end. Action is always a means to 
some end. A clear and well-defined act never 
leaves a man as it finds him. It urges him on his 
way to some end. For an act is infinitely more 
than the thought which dies in the dream, more 
than the desire which is not able to gratify itself, 
more than the resolve which falters on the thresh- 
old of action. An act is thought, desire, resolve, 
passing without the man, and beyond recall, into 
outward shape. An act is the embodiment of per- 
sonality. When a man has acted we say that he 
has put himself on record. We can at any time 
go back to the act and find him. 

There are two ways of accustoming ourselves 
to think of this constant and vast expenditure of 
personality. We can think of it as building up 
another self. We can personify our careers. This 
is the habit of men of a certain type of ambi- 
tion. They begin by projecting themselves in 



8 PERSONAL POWER 

imagination into desired places, or by clothing 
themselves with power, or by enriching them- 
selves with a fortune. Gradually as they act they 
try to fill in the picture. They live more and more 
in this other self. The real man is drawn upon 
to the last resource to furnish material for his 
career, a career of which he must take the issue. 
When the career is ended, the method comes out, 
and also the contrast between the original and 
the self-made man. 

Or we may learn to think of ourselves with an 
equal ambition, not only as capable of action in 
distinction from activity, but as bound to act. 
We may feel with an equal stir the power of the 
initiative. But in place of the calculating or the 
reckless ambition there may be a certain reserve 
of mastery. Even our earlier choices and acts 
may come under a provisional self-government. 
In such event the consciousness is never absent 
that it is we who are acting, and that we must 
take the return of our actions to enlarge or to 
deplete our personality. The man who thus acts 
does not lose himself in his career ; and when that 
comes to an end, he abides in personal power. 
One may think of the difference between Napo- 
leon at St. Helena and Washington at Mount 
Vernon, the one living in his reflections upon 
his career, the other living in the consciousness 



PROVISIONAL SELF-GOVERNMENT 9 

of continued influence. We cannot overestimate, 
I am sure, the variance between the theory of 
living for our acts which we may bind up in a 
career, and the theory of regarding our acts as 
an integral part of ourselves, every act related 
to and identified with the intellect, the con- 
science, and the will. Evidently the man who 
works upon the latter theory is the man of duty 
in distinction from the man of mere ambition. 
And in the long run he has the advantage of his 
theory, for the world of duty is bigger than the 
world of ambition. The things which are wait- 
ing to be done, and which are asking to be done, 
are more and greater than the things which are 
likely to hear our call and come forth to serve 
our ends. So true is this, that we may not hesi- 
tate to apply to the world of duty the fine word 
of the prophet: "Since the beginning of the 
world men have not heard, nor perceived by the 
ear, neither hath the. eye seen, God, beside 
thee, what he hath prepared for him that waiteth 
for him." 

I answer, again, that every man's life, if viewed 
as a means to an end, is a growth through the 
limitation of desire. The strength of a man is in 
his desires, but strength could not have been lo- 
cated at more precarious sources. For desires are 
so many and so imperious and so conflicting, that 



10 PERSONAL POWER 

as soon as they begin to act, a disintegrating pro- 
cess begins. We are broken up by our desires, and 
our powers scattered. Half the waste of college 
life goes this way. And when this danger of 
waste, or dissipation of energy, is over, another 
and greater danger lies in wait for us, the danger 
from competition. Some desire of a relatively low 
grade has gained the supremacy in our mind. The 
same desire has gained the supremacy in other 
minds. They meet, we will say, in the world of dis- 
play. Desires upon the same grade must contend 
simply for degree. Display can be outdone only 
by more display. So the vulgarizing process goes 
on, the most humiliating feature of modern social 
life. Or they meet in the world of gain. It is still 
simply more. No matter what the competition is, 
the range of excellence is restricted to quantities 
and amounts. 

It becomes evident that the only advantage 
which the man himself can get from his desires 
must come through some limitation of them. Un- 
limited, they waste his substance, his personal sub- 
stance, and may make him an object of vulgar 
curiosity or contempt. Under proper limitations 
they remain the source of his essential strength. 

But how shall one limit his desires ? Certainly 
not by suppressing them. The world has had 
enough of that folly. There are really but two 



PROVISIONAL SELF-GOVERNMENT 11 

ways; either by such concentration of desires 
upon a sufficient object that all desires are forced 
to lend their aid, or by such elevation of desire 
through the refinement of taste, the ennobling 
of ambition, the training of conscience, that all 
lower desires lose their place of power. But 
either one of these ways is gradual. Each repre- 
sents a growth. More frequently perhaps than 
otherwise the advance comes as a reformation. 
We speak of men who have been delivered from 
the power of appetite and passion as reformed 
men. There are very few of us who do not need 
the cleansing of desires, the refining of tastes, 
the reforming of habits of thought and action to 
a degree equivalent to what is known in religious 
speech as conversion, if indeed it be not that very 
thing. 

And I answer once more that every man's life, 
if viewed as a means to an end, is a search after 
truth. We lose a great deal of assumed and some 
real truth with the years. The volume of truth 
shrinks as we read it. A part of that which 
seemed to be true proves to be false, and more 
becomes unreal. Doubtless we throw away much 
truth with that which seems to be error. The 
critical habit of mind often lacks fairness and 
sometimes sanity. And the uncritical habit is 
more wasteful still. It debases the currency 



12 PERSONAL POWER 

through failure to maintain the standards. The 
result is that the average man among us is apt 
to grow poorer rather than richer in the most 
priceless of all possessions. I suppose that we sel- 
dom become aware of this change except as we 
are led in some way to feel at times our spirit- 
ual solitude. When truth is no longer familiar 
enough to us to serve us as a friend then are we 
indeed in solitary places. It must be hard for a 
man to die alone ; it must be hard to die poor ; 
it must be hardest of all to die unbefriended of 
truth : to feel that there is nothing certain, near, 
warm, as one enters the great mystery ; to see no 
familiar object on the spiritual horizon, — 

" What time the white sail of the soul is rounding 
The mystic cape — the promontory Death." 

The search after truth — I do not speak now 
of scientific or philosophic truth which has its 
own reward, but of moral truth within any man's 
reach — the search after truth is the most neces- 
sary of all the means to the ends of life. It is hard 
to conceive of one as having really lived in this 
world who has not possessed himself of its high 
realities. This is what the Scriptures say to us in 
ceaseless iteration ; and this is what men say to 
us, who have anything to say which we care to 
hear. 



PROVISIONAL SELF-GOVERNMENT 13 

And now what is the end to which faith, 
and decisive action, and controlled desire, and the 
search after truth are the means? What is the 
goal toward which we move through these great 
experiences which are possible to us in the right 
ordering of our lives? "Until we come" — St. 
Paul says — "unto a perfect man." 

Is it not worth a man's while to set up in the 
days of his immaturity a self-government which 
will give him some assurance of maturity ? Time 
can give us no such assurance. It may only make 
one's immaturity more obvious and painful. But 
it was not in God's intention, nor is it writ in the 
destiny of any man, that he should fail to arrive 
at full-grown manhood. I know the tremendous 
obstacles, I know the temptations which line the 
way, and the greater temptation within, but still 
I see the goal clear and shining, yes, transfigured. 
I left the sentence, which I quoted from St. Paul, 
broken and incomplete. I now go back to com- 
plete it. "Until we come . . . unto a perfect 
man, unto the measure of the stature of the ful- 
ness of Christ." I would not have you forget 
for a moment that the possibilities of our hu- 
manity have been realized in Christ, that every 
man of us may find in Him his own possible des- 
tiny. This is what Christianity means. This is its 
task. It does not shrink from its task nor stop 



14 PERSONAL POWER 

short of its end. It proposes to deal with us 
according to our capacity if we will give it room 
in our lives for its work. It promises nothing, 
absolutely nothing, to indifferent or careless, or 
to calculating and bargaining souls. But to men 
who speak to God in the terms of manhood He 
gives answer in the terms of manhood. You 
want to come to a full-grown man. You shall 
come, and when you shall have come, you will 
see for the first time the measure of your man- 
hood, " the measure of the stature of the fulness 
of Christ." 



II 

THE ESTIMATION OF POWER 

" And the three mighty men brake through the host of the Philis- 
tines, and drew water out of the well of Beth-lehem, that was by the 
gate, and took it, and brought it to David : nevertheless he would not 
drink thereof, but poured it out unto the Lord." — 2 Samuel xxiii, 16. 

This exquisite story, exquisite as we read it, was 
one of the many war stories of Israel. In the es- 
timation of the time it was not one of the great- 
est. The narrator, who is giving the names of the 
chief of David's mighty men, and telling of their 
valorous deeds, says explicitly, that these mighty 
men were not of the first rank, and their deed, as 
he places it, is evidently not to be compared with 
that of one at least of a greater three who rose 
up against the Philistines and slew, and slew, and 
slew, till " his hand clave unto the sword." 

And yet it is primarily a story of these mighty 
men, not of David. What he did is purely inci- 
dental. It is their valorous deed, not his senti- 
ment, which stirs the imagination of the writer, 
and the imagination of his time. But not so with 
us. What David did has taken this story out of 
its time and setting, and carried it into other 
ages and among other peoples. 

These things did these three mighty men, — 



16 PERSONAL POWER 

they " brake through the host of the Philistines, 
and drew water out of the well of Beth-lehem, 
that was by the gate, and took it, and brought 
it to David: nevertheless he would not drink 
thereof, but poured it out unto the Lord." 

David, of course, as chief among his mighty 
men, must have been mightier than they, with 
more deeds of a like sort to his credit, but might 
never could have made him anything more than 
a barbaric chief. It was his finer sense of power, 
his refusal to slake his thirst with the blood of 
his men, his sacrificial use of their valor, which 
made him fit to be a king. Sadly inconsistent this 
man was at times, and yet through all his career 
of violence and passion, there runs the constant 
sense of the sacredness of power, with the frequent 
expression of it in acts of mercy and sacrifice. 
We all feel the reality, as we feel the pathos, of 
the last words of this ruler of men, — 

" David the son of Jesse saith, 
And the man who was raised on high saith, 



The Rock of Israel spake to me : 

One that ruleth over men righteously, 

That ruleth in the fear of God, 

He shall be as the light of the morning, when the sun riseth, 

A morning without clouds ; 

When the tender grass springeth out of the earth, 

Through clear shining after rain. 

Verily my house is not so with God ; 

Yet he hath made with me an everlasting covenant, 



THE ESTIMATION OF POWER 17 

Ordered in all things, and sure: 

For it is all my salvation, and all my desire, 

Although he maketh it not to grow." 

It is the constant and gracious office of this old- 
time Biblical story as it enters each new generation, 
to remind men, wherever it can get a hearing, 
of the sacredness of power. Its office is corre- 
spondingly great and delicate as it enters any 
age of peculiar power. Therefore its place in our 
own age. It is becoming as hard for us to think 
sanely, to keep, that is, the true perspective, in 
the presence of our mighty men and their deeds, 
as it was for the age which saw the deeds of 
David and his mighty men. Almost any narrator 
of current events puts the emphasis about where 
this old-time narrator put the emphasis upon the 
events of his day. He took the first and easy 
measurements of power, — the number of foes a 
mighty man could slay between the rising of the 
sun and its setting. We exploit the market very 
much as he exploited the battlefield. How much 
money can be made between the rising and the 
setting of the sun? And yet we know that in 
the long, perhaps in the near retrospect, there 
will be marked changes in the valuation put 
upon the power of our age. It is one part of the 
business of educated men — men, that is, who are 
not foreshortening their vision — to anticipate 



18 PERSONAL POWER 

something of this later, clearer, more lasting judg- 
ment. I do not mean that the attitude of an edu- 
cated man to his time should be merely judicial 
or critical. He is first, and of necessity, an actor, 
a producer, a winner, if you will, in the struggle. 
But he, of all men, ought to be able to keep the 
perspective, that he may not see only the things 
which are to grow dim in after times, that he may 
not miss the things which are to be resplendent 
in after times. 

Hence the subject of which I wish to speak to 
you more at length — The Estimation of Power, 
the Power of your own Times. 

I am not about to advise any premature judg- 
ment. Judgment follows knowledge, and know- 
ledge is slow, and hard, and late, the outcome of 
humility, and patience, and charity. The single 
fact which I wish to impress upon you is the fact 
that power, the power of the world, is not some- 
thing to be accepted just because it is power, but 
something to be estimated. And that I may urge 
this fact upon you with the greater distinctness, 
let me put you on your guard against the increas- 
ing tendency to reject power just because it is 
power. There are a great many people among 
us who are becoming afraid of the world. The 
number, I think, is increasing, and out of their 
fear grows much unwisdom of speech and action. 



THE ESTIMATION OF POWER 19 

The greatest safeguard in all times of large 
and perhaps dangerous activity is discrimination. 
More and more people seem to be losing the 
power to discriminate. To their minds things 
which are vast and complex are necessarily evil. 
Likewise, things with which they are unfamiliar. 
A great many persons have not as yet become 
used to the modern world, and in its vastness and 
strangeness they suspect evil at every turn. Be- 
cause it is so full of power, it must be, they reason, 
full of evil. I warn you against suspicion, or pre- 
judice, or unintelligent apprehension, in respect 
to power, and in respect to powerful men. Let us 
never discriminate against the large in favor of 
the small, among men or among things. Discrimi- 
nation goes with things and with men of a kind. 
I urge upon you then the estimation of power, 
rather than the acceptance or rejection of it just 
because it is power. You cannot afford to be mor- 
ally indifferent to the commanding forces of your 
time, and you cannot afford to ignore or escape 
them. They challenge your opinion. The safest 
thing that you can do is to accept the challenge. 
If you do not, if you decline to take sufficient 
moral account of the power of your time, it will 
certainly, though it may be unconsciously to your- 
selves, mould you to its type, and use you to its 
ends, so far as you may seem to be worth using. 



20 PERSONAL POWER 

I think that every one of us should approach the 
study of the power of his time in the spirit of true 
appreciation, if not of profound thankfulness. I 
can conceive of no greater calamity than to be 
born into a weak and spiritless age. Better by far 
the tumultuous and at times confusing life of an 
age like our own, with its intellectual adventure 
and its moral daring, than any age of petrified 
thought or of stagnant feeling, under whatever 
name of peace it may have been known. But the 
spirit of appreciation, or even of thankfulness for 
the endowment of our age, should not incline us 
to any indiscriminate acknowledgment of its power. 
So far as possible we should try to anticipate 
the judgment of later times. In that judgment, 
some things will come forth into clear view which 
are now overlooked, and other things which are 
now conspicuous will lose their relative signifi- 
cance. What of that judgment can we anticipate 
with any certainty in our present estimation of 
power? Naturally I call your attention to those 
things which are not at present most apparent. 

The power of our time will be judged, I believe, 
far more than we are as yet aware, according to 
its restraints. The first thing men ask about is 
results ; the second, the method by which they 
were gained. First, did he win the game ? second, 
did he play fair? But the second question is sure 



THE ESTIMATION OF POWER 21 

to be asked, and in the end is usually decisive. 
The advantage goes with the last word, and that 
always belongs to justice. In so diversified a 
matter as the power of an age, especially if its 
task be largely that of reconstruction, much al- 
lowance is made in respect to method. Departures 
from tradition, from the ordinary routine, from 
the established order, are acknowledged as insep- 
arable from progress, but never a departure from 
justice. Even the ages which gave us religious 
and political liberty are not set free from this 
test. It was not to be expected that existing laws 
would be a complete and adequate expression of 
justice, under the sudden and almost overwhelm- 
ing increase in the economic power of our age. 
Laws framed to meet other conditions would nat- 
urally be restrictive and possibly obstructive. But 
the law of a free land is after all the only safe- 
guard for as well as against any sudden increase 
of power. Power of any kind must submit itself 
to the supreme test of restraint. Have we met 
the test? Partially. There has been, and there 
remains, a sufficient amount of unrestrained power 
to endanger the repute of our age in the final 
reckoning. Some men among us are simply in- 
toxicated with power. Engaged in high ventures, 
they show no signs of mental sobriety. They are 
continually playing the game. Other men of very 



22 PERSONAL POWER 

different sort, sober-minded, sagacious, honorable, 
intent upon their enterprises, chafe and fret under 
restraints. Conscious of their integrity as they 
are of their power, they would be a law unto them- 
selves, for what they believe to be the public good. 
And there are others still of an entirely different 
type, who in the furtherance of their selfish and 
greedy ambitions do not hesitate to attempt to 
subvert the law, and to try the integrity of the 
courts of justice. 

I do not say that corruption of this last kind, 
or of any kind, is characteristic of the more 
powerful men of our time. What is becoming 
clear is the fact of their impatience of restraint, 
so that in your estimation of power, as you see it 
exemplified to-day, you must be prepared to qual- 
ify it by this moral limitation. The inference from 
this qualification is plain. Your generation will 
doubtless add a vast amount of power to this 
country. Do not allow yourselves to be satisfied 
with that prospect, or with the part which you 
may take in its fulfillment. The serious question 
before your generation is not, how much are you 
to add to the power of this country, but in what 
state are you to leave the country when you have 
done your work. Will its citizens be more or less 
law-abiding? Will the classes, for there are such 
already, be nearer together or further apart? Will 



THE ESTIMATION OF POWER 23 

the church be freer, purer, more vital ? Will the 
republic be more secure or less secure? The answer 
to these questions will depend in no considerable 
degree upon the estimation of power entertained 
by your generation, and particularly at this point 
of willingness to submit to the restraints of justice. 
Another judgment which we must face, and 
which we do well to anticipate, is the judgment 
of power according to its refinements. When 
power has met the fair demands of law as express- 
ing justice, it must go on to meet the demands 
of art as expressing the sincerity and fineness of 
the human spirit. Power which makes us violent, 
or coarse, or vain, inflicts a really moral hurt. It 
wars against the soul. For art is one of the true 
and sincere ways in which the human spirit tries 
to find itself at its best. Very few of us are so 
foolish as to suppose that we see the world as it 
is, or men as they are. We know that we lack 
vision. We want the interpretation of the life 
which we see around us, and the discovery of that 
which seems afar off. We are continually asking 
for some one to tell us the meaning of the things 
we see, as we are always asking for some one to 
say the things we cannot utter, or to do the things 
which we are too timid or clumsy to attempt. 
The satisfaction of this craving is the ministry 
of art to the human spirit. "I remember/' says 



24 PERSONAL POWER 

Emerson, " when in my younger days I had 
heard of the wonders of Italian painting I fan- 
cied the great pictures would he great strangers : 
some surprising combination of power and color : 
a foreign wonder. When at last I came to Rome 
and saw with eyes the pictures, I found that 
genius left to novices the gay and fantastic and 
ostentatious, and itself pierced directly to the 
simple and the true : that it was familiar and sin- 
cere : that it was the old eternal fact I had 
met in so many forms — unto which I lived. I 
now require of pictures that they domesticate me, 
not that they dazzle me." Such is the ministry 
of art to the human spirit, to " domesticate " us, 
to help us " to live on even terms with time," to 
bring the spirit and the senses into harmony. 

In our estimation of power we cannot afford 
to overlook the test of art. So far as we observe 
or have experience, does the power of our age 
mock the spirit ? Asking for bread, does it give 
bread or a stone? Does it employ the spirit 
rather than satisfy it? Or does power as we 
see its workings provide for the needs of the 
spirit, minister through various agencies to its 
culture, and afford the means for its satisfaction ? 
It is difficult to say. The evidence is contradic- 
tory. When Thoreau graduated at Harvard sixty 
years ago he defended the thesis — " The world 



THE ESTIMATION OF POWER 25 

is more beautiful than useful." Since that time 
the world has grown many times more useful. 
But utility is not the foe of beauty. The world 
is no less beautiful because more useful. The foe 
of art is vulgarity, display, vanity. These are 
the things which humiliate the spirit of man. It 
is difficult, I repeat, to say what is the effect of 
this atmosphere of power, in which we live and 
breathe, upon the finer attributes of the human 
soul. Sometimes it seems, as we watch the results 
of the processes of education, and social culture, 
and travel, and the increasing appreciation of the 
arts, as if we were as a people growing finer as 
well as stronger and richer ; and then some out- 
burst of vulgar display, representative apparently 
of some advanced type of social life, makes us 
pause and question. So that again, in our esti- 
mation of power we are obliged to qualify any 
superficial opinion we have formed. The very 
doubt throws us back upon our premise, — we 
cannot allow ourselves to accept power just be- 
cause it is power. 

There is still another judgment, most serious 
of all, to be passed upon the power of any age. 
The power of an age will be judged according to 
the presence or absence of the element of sacrifice. 
This is the clear and urgent lesson of the incident 
from which we started. Other lessons which we 



26 PERSONAL POWER 

have drawn are suggested by it : this lies at its 
heart, power redeemed, transfigured by sacrifice. 
The heroic offering of these mighty men was too 
costly to be accepted for the end which prompted 
it. There was but one end which could match 
the deed — its sacrificial use. "And David poured 
it out unto the Lord." 

The condition of this old story is continually 
repeating itself. The question comes again and 
again to a man, to a nation, to an age. Shall the 
water drawn from the well of Bethlehem which 
is by the gate be taken to slake one's own 
thirst, or the thirst of others, through its gift 
unto the Lord? This I say is the test by which 
every age of power must be judged, — will it 
spend the best which it has upon itself, or will it 
send on something of its best to the ages which 
may follow? Let us not miss the real significance 
of the alternative. The spirit of sacrifice has no 
equivalent. There is the spirit of thrift through 
which the savings of one generation may become 
the property of another. The spirit of thrift may 
work to the advantage of others, but it is not the 
spirit of sacrifice. There is the spirit of self- 
denial, through which one loses that he may gain, 
giving up the lower for the higher, luxury for 
efficiency. Every virile race has been such be- 
cause of self-denial, from the Hebrew brought 



THE ESTIMATION OF POWER 27 

up on the "Thou shalt not" of the command- 
ments to the Samurai trained under the moral 
discipline of Bushido. But the spirit of self-denial 
is not of necessity the spirit of sacrifice. The 
essence of sacrifice is the gift of the costliest. 
Self-sacrifice is the gift of one's self, because 
nothing means so much to a man as himself. 
Sacrifice means the refusal to use the rich en- 
dowments, and the high promises, and the large 
opportunities, and the costliest gains for personal 
ends. It is these refusals which carry power over 
from one age to another, and give it abiding 
honor. 

In any attempt you may make to analyze the 
power of your age, you should not fail to give 
a rightful place to the element of sacrifice. If the 
power of an age is chiefly an earning and a 
spending power, no matter how vast may be its 
earnings, nor how vast may be its expenditures, 
it will not put much on deposit for after ages. 

I do not know, it is impossible for any one to 
tell, how much the benevolence of our time ex- 
presses sacrifice; but this much is beginning to 
be evident, namely, the disposition to throw off 
many just demands on personal benevolence upon 
rich men simply because they are rich. In re- 
marking upon the proposal that a religious 
denomination should invite a certain rich man to 



28 PERSONAL POWER 

provide for its aged and indigent ministers, the 
New York " Times " exclaims : " There it is, the 
expectation fast coming to a stern demand, that 
any neglected duty of a public or semi-public, 
or charitable or semi-charitable sort, shall be as- 
sumed, not by those who voluntarily incur and are 
entirely able to perform it if they choose, but by 
the millionaire, the one person to whom the per- 
formance of the duty is so easy, so entirely free 
from any element of self-sacrifice, that it makes a 
wholly insignificant item on the credit side of his 
account of things well or ill done. Of course the 
millionaire has his own large duties to perform, 
but there is difficulty in seeing that they include 
the pauperization of solvent corporations, or com- 
mittees, or individuals." I have frequently had 
occasion to call your attention to the increasing 
proportion of the graduates of our colleges who 
enter the gainful callings rather than the callings 
which lead straight to service. The direct giving 
of self certainly does not match the widening 
opportunity. "Why do young men go to the city ? 
Because they heed the alluring invitations of the 
city, not because they hear the cry of the city. 
And as respects duties which are national in their 
scope, like the lifting of burdens which, if not 
borne to-day, will fall with crushing weight on 
the next generation, I am not sure that we are 



THE ESTIMATION OF POWER 29 

acting even with a just responsibility. I have in 
mind, as I speak, the duty of the whole nation 
to the colored race in the South, which is so fast 
becoming a duty of the nation to its own future. 
I can understand many of the difficulties which 
hedge our way, but I cannot understand our 
hesitancy where the way is open, the duty con- 
fessed, and the present result such as to justify 
the largest investment in the training of a race. 
I will not multiply illustrations. All that I have 
wanted to show you at this point as at previous 
points is the need of understanding the power of 
your age so that you be not awed or misled by 
it. The premise of my argument, I make it the 
refrain of my sermon, is, you cannot afford to 
accept or reject power, just because it is power. 
You must estimate it. In trying to help you to 
some right estimation of the power of your time, 
I have called in certain standards, the constants 
of christian civilization, by which every age is 
tested, — law, art, and the religious spirit as ex- 
pressed in sacrifice. These are not all, but they 
are well-recognized claimants in behalf of the hu- 
man soul in every age of power. If their claims 
are not heeded, they enter their protest against 
the age which spurns them. And they have their 
sure revenge. The revenge of the human soul, 
when its rights are ignored by power, is history. 



30 PERSONAL POWER 

I remind you again that it is the business of the 
educated man to anticipate with some accuracy, 
in his estimation of the power of his age, the 
clear and final judgment of his kind. And I re- 
mind you still further that the personal attitude 
of a man to the world depends upon the value 
which he puts upon the power of the world. If 
the things of sense are more to him than the 
things of the spirit he will try to get them at the 
cost of the things of the spirit. If you really want 
money more than you want honesty you will be 
pretty sure to get money at the price of honesty. 
A man's desires are terrible things to trifle with. 
When a man loses the balance of reason we say 
that he is mentally insane. When a man loses 
the balance of his desires he becomes morally in- 
sane. Therefore Jesus says to men in his mighty 
wisdom, " Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and 
his righteousness, and all these things shall be 
added unto you." Keep then the balance, keep 
the proportion, keep the perspective. Start in with 
righteousness and you shall come out with your 
nation great, your cities safe, your corporations 
strong, your social life clean, your personal lives 
honorable in the sight of all men. 



ni 

WISDOM THE PRINCIPAL THING 

" Wisdom is the principal thing : therefore get wisdom : yea with all 
thy getting get understanding." — Proverbs iv, 7. 

There is to my mind a certain inherent ugliness 
in the word "get," and it is not above reproach 
in some of its associations, but we shall all agree 
that it is one of the most characteristic words of 
our language. It pervades our common speech 
with the force of a race word. All the initiative, 
the acquisitiveness, the pride of possession which 
mark the Anglo-Saxon find expression in this 
homely syllable. It is not to be wondered at that 
our translators have used it frequently in the 
transfer of thought from the terse and sinewy 
Hebrew. 

I have called your attention to this word be- 
cause it gives so much strength and movement to 
my text. This old-time writer is speaking about 
wisdom, but not in any abstract or academic way. 
He speaks of it just as if it were something to be 
found in the market place or in the field. I shall 
try to speak to you in this same spirit concerning 
wisdom. My subject is the present call to wis- 
dom, the call to you out of your generation. I 



32 PERSONAL POWER 

shall try to show you that at this time — under 
present conditions of private and public life — 
"wisdom is the principal thing;" and in attempt- 
ing to do this I hope to be able to say to each 
one of you, through every sentence which I utter, 
" therefore get wisdom : yea with all thy getting 
get understanding." 

Of course this insistence upon the getting of 
wisdom means that wisdom can be acquired. 
Doubtless some men are born with a greater ca- 
pacity or aptitude for it than others, but wisdom 
is not an endowment. Neither is it entirely a 
matter of experience. It is chiefly an acquisition, 
something to be gained in greater or less degree 
by all men as they give the rightful place to it 
among the powers which ought to belong to them 
in their maturity. Some men are foolish because 
they do not care to be wise. Some men lack wis- 
dom because they do not take time to be wise. 
Some men fail to be nobly wise through coward- 
ice, the constant and most serious foe to wisdom. 
But all the while wisdom is something to be had 
through desire, through patient seeking, through 
courageous action. 

All this will become plain to you if I can 
rightly interpret the present call to wisdom, the 
call of your generation. The cry of the past gen- 
eration, especially of the past decade, has been 



WISDOM THE PRINCIPAL THING 33 

for efficiency. We have asked everywhere and 
unceasingly for the efficient man, meaning thereby 
the man of results. We have striven in all possi- 
ble ways to produce him. School, and shop, and 
street have been in close competition toward this 
end. We have gained our end. We have produced 
the efficient man, the man capable of results, able 
to show his power not in one but in many ways. 
The most conspicuous type, the man of vast for- 
tune, exists because other men of efficiency are 
at work with him, and for him, and unto him. 
But now that we have the efficient man and the 
results due to him, we are not quite easy or safe 
in his presence, nor are we as sure of the results 
which he has given us as we would like to be. 
And yet we do not want to lower our standard 
of efficiency, we do not wish to produce a feebler 
or less effective man. We do not care to change 
the proportions of life with which we have become 
familiar, and return to a world of scant equipment 
and of hesitant forces. It would be the merest cant 
on our part to pray for adversity in place of the 
growing resources and the enlarging opportuni- 
ties of our time. What we really want is security, 
confidence, satisfaction concerning the things we 
have, and concerning our way of getting them, 
and a more satisfying sense than we now have 
that we are really getting the best things. I think 



34 PERSONAL POWER 

that we are beginning to be willing to pay the 
price of these assurances. At any rate we have 
come to the stage of reflection, and are unwilling 
to trust ourselves any longer to the arbitrary and 
unregulated power of the merely efficient man. 
Hence the unmistakable call to wisdom where 
once we heard nothing but the cry for efficiency. 

As the call is new, this call to you of your gen- 
eration, let me try to interpret it to you in some 
of its deeper meanings. I do not believe that it is 
the call of mere caution or fear. I do not recog- 
nize in it the voice of a traditional conservatism 
which is always in protest at the rate of progress. 
I do not detect in it the accents of a worldly wis- 
dom, which is indifferent to principles, afraid only 
of consequences. It seems to me to be at its best 
a brave, honest, believing call, a veritable call of 
the spirit in men to the spirit in men : otherwise 
I would not repeat it in your presence or try to 
interpret it to your understanding. 

Let me say then, in the first place, that it seems 
to me to be one of the many and oft-repeated 
calls to righteousness, taking now the form of a 
challenge to the mind, especially to the trained 
mind, to the end of its own freedom. There have 
been ages in which the greatest danger to right- 
eousness lay in passion, sometimes in morbid and 
degenerate passion. There have been ages in 



WISDOM THE PKINCIPAL THING 35 

which the greatest danger to righteousness lay in 
bigotry, in the narrowing and hardening of con- 
science in the assumed interest of truth. The 
chief danger to righteousness in our time lies 
in the perversion of the intellect. Too many men 
among us are selling their minds in the market 
place. Wrong schemes prosper in many cases be- 
cause they are devised or carried out by men of 
brains in the employ of men of will. In some in- 
stances subordinates are guilty of practices which 
their principals would not commend. The desire, 
for example, of a manager to make a good show- 
ing in the business must be under the control of 
both honesty and justice, else there will be harm 
done to those below him, or injury to the busi- 
ness itself. I put you on your guard against the 
bartering of the mind for any supposable returns 
in position or in money. The real return, the ac- 
tual reward in every such case, is servitude. 

In saying this I do not dissuade you from put- 
ting your talents at the service of men of accu- 
mulated power, or at the service of corporations. 
The presumption is in favor of integrity in the 
business world. If you enter this world you have 
the right to that presumption. But in any par- 
ticular case, if you find that you have been de- 
ceived, the sooner you part company with a dis- 
honest or unjust man, or with a dishonest or 



36 PERSONAL POWER 

unjust corporation, the better for you. You can- 
not afford the inevitable result of such service — 
servitude. On the other hand, identification with 
a man, or house, or corporation of honorable re- 
cord, of clean and humane methods, and of satis- 
fying enterprise ought to call out your unfailing 
loyalty and your unstinted effort. You can afford 
to put into such service whatever mental power 
you have, in the assurance of the appreciation of 
the highest result of your power, namely, mental 
rectitude. The present call to wisdom is nothing 
less than a challenge to the mind of your gener- 
ation to preserve its moral freedom. Can you think 
of a nobler call? Is it not as noble a thing to keep 
the mind free from the slavery of dishonesty, as 
it is to keep it free from the slavery of supersti- 
tion or bigotry ? Yet we applaud the men and the 
ages which fought for this kind of freedom, and 
passed on their victory. Do not ignore or deny 
the challenge of your age to mental freedom, 
through mental rectitude, in the presence of the 
enslaving power of corrupt wealth. Make it easier, 
not more difficult, for your sons, and for all men 
who may come after you, " to do justly, to love 
mercy," yes, and "to walk humbly with God," 
not meanly and cringingly with men, but humbly 
with God. 

This new call to wisdom is then, to begin with, 



WISDOM THE PRINCIPAL THING 37 

a call to self-respecting independence. It strikes 
at once the note of freedom. It strikes perhaps a 
deeper note as it recalls the mind of your gener- 
ation to its obligation to truth. If the first note 
is freedom the second is loyalty. We have fallen 
upon a singular and in some cases glaring incon- 
sistency in the material development of our time. 
This material development is based upon scientific 
truth, the first condition of which is mental hon- 
esty. The whole process of scientific training, 
with all the results consequent upon it, has in- 
volved from first to last this quality. It has been 
a costly training, costly in the amount and char- 
acter of the instruction required, costly in its 
equipment, costly through the insistence which it 
has placed upon the trustworthiness of the results 
demanded. This training toward scientific truth 
has been costly also in some of its incidental 
effects. Wherever it has been adopted and ap- 
plied outside the natural or physical sciences, as 
in the realm of history, or philosophy, or theology, 
it has changed opinions of men and of events, it 
has revolutionized theories, it has modified reli- 
gious beliefs. It has cost many men very much to 
accept these changes in inherited opinions, in 
established and working theories, and in personal 
belief, but they have accepted them loyally and 
unflinchingly in the interest of truth. The critical 



38 PERSONAL POWER 

habit of the age, which has wrought such changes 
elsewhere in the interest of truth, has paused and 
grown hesitant, and ineffective, and cowardly be- 
fore the material development which it has done 
so much to set in motion. The methods of build- 
ing up and expanding great business enterprises 
have not been subjected to the same tests which 
have been applied unsparingly by critics, and 
bravely accepted by all who have been concerned 
with scientific investigation, with historical re- 
search, or with religious beliefs. The inconsist- 
ency is, as I have said, singular and glaring. At 
the very point where the scientifically trained 
mind might have been expected to assert its mo- 
rality, just where it has to do with material values 
affecting human life, it has failed. It has tolerated 
shams, it has jockeyed with values, it has devised 
and executed frauds : and in so far as it has done, 
or allowed the doing of any of these things, it has 
been disloyal to its own training. It is inconsist- 
ent to create a value through all the scrupulously 
exact processes of its creation, and then to give 
it commercial license. We must learn to handle 
material values with the same care which we ex- 
ercise in creating them. We cannot afford to have 
one standard of honesty in the creation of wealth, 
and another standard in the manipulation of 
wealth. The inconsistency is grievous. The pre- 



WISDOM THE PRINCIPAL THING 39 

sent call to wisdom is therefore in part a recall of 
the trained mind of your generation to its con- 
stant and continuous obligation to truth. There 
is no point at which it can decline its obliga- 
tions, and remain a factor in the productive 
power of the world. So long as it concerns itself 
primarily with material values, it must guarantee 
them to the public. This is a fair demand. Speak- 
ing in behalf of those whose business it is to train 
the mind to efficiency, I accept, in all which it 
implies, this demand that it be trained to morality. 
I give you one further thought in the inter- 
pretation of the present call to wisdom. First, 
as we have seen, this call is a challenge to the 
trained mind to a self-respecting independence; 
then it is a summons to the mind to a consistent 
morality ; and now at last it makes its appeal to 
the mind for unselfish forethought. There is no 
form of the call to wisdom which is more serious 
than the protest it utters against the selfishness 
of living in and for the present. It is the protest 
which above all protests we need to hear. We 
belong to an age which lives in and for itself. 
The spirit of the age is infectious. All things are 
saying to us, every man is saying to his neigh- 
bor, " Live in the now, live to the full." The 
world is just now so rich and splendid, so full of 
desirable things, that it does not seem as if it 



40 PERSONAL POWER 

could always, or for long time, be held in posses- 
sion. Men recall the poor, and scanty, and strug- 
gling periods which have had their place in the 
history of every people. Many a man recalls a 
yet nearer time in his own experience of want, 
and hardship, and unrewarding toil. The con- 
trast with the abundant rewards and relieving 
methods which are now his, enhances the value 
of every day in the life of the present. And who 
knows what is to come ? Who can date the re- 
turn of the hard economies, the severe virtues, 
the struggle for existence? Who can declare 
even the law of diminishing returns ? Who can 
forecast the economic changes, the social re- 
versals, the limitations upon the national suprem- 
acy, which may give us the environment of an- 
other kind of world? So men question within 
themselves ; and so they reason toward the prac- 
tical conclusion, " Let us seize the present ; let us 
live in the day." 

No observant or sensitive man can fail to see 
or to feel this intense eagerness to live in the 
present. It explains in part the quickening of 
the pace in education. Education is becoming 
more and more a means to some immediate end. 
The end is so near, so tangible, so tempting, why 
stop on the way for the enrichment of the mind 
or the enlargement of desires? The scholar who 



WISDOM THE PRINCIPAL THING 41 

is to become a teacher, even in the higher grades, 
is quite as much in haste as, and often more ready- 
to abridge his training than, his fellow student 
preparing for the law, for medicine, or for the 
ministry. This same eagerness to live in and for 
the present is more manifest still in its effect 
upon social life, especially upon the life of the 
home. The children of the rich are put out earlier 
and earlier because the home can no longer make 
suitable provision for them, and at the same time 
keep up the social round of exciting and exhaust- 
ing pleasures. The home of the old New England 
families is no longer charged with the spirit of 
sacrifice which once characterized it. Children are 
not so much as formerly an investment. Some- 
thing of the money which once sent boys to 
college goes into the cheap luxuries of the house. 
I make no sweeping statement at this point, 
but the difference between the former and later 
times is brought out by the social sacrifices of 
the newer peoples who are beginning to appro- 
priate the old New England custom of making 
the children of the home the great investment, 
— the mark of unselfish forethought. 

I do not dwell upon the innumerable signs of 
this eagerness to live in and for the present in 
the business world. We expect to find much of 
it there. There is more immaturity in the busi- 



42 PERSONAL POWER 

ness world than anywhere else, and on the whole 
I think that it lasts longer with the individual 
man. As a very sagacious observer recently said, 
the proportion of failures, absolute failures, is 
nowhere else so great. Failures, however, are 
not to be deplored so much as successes which 
prejudice the future, as when markets which 
have been fairly won are lost by cheapening the 
product; successes which are gained at the ex- 
pense of the public through corrupt or fraudu- 
lent practices, and successes, most despicable of 
all, which destroy life, which make the poverty 
of the poor their destruction. There is no com- 
plaint of our time so just as the complaint against 
indifferent wealth. 

The call, then, of wisdom to men, whoever 
they may be, who are living too much in and 
for the present, is a straight appeal to their un- 
selfishness ; and the unselfishness of the mind is 
best expressed in foresight. It says to the man 
who really proposes to give himself to others, 
who aspires to one of the self-denying callings, 
but who is in haste to be about his business : 
" See to it that in giving yourself you make a 
sufficient gift. Enlarge yourself, enrich yourself, 
refine your power. Be not content with the spirit 
of giving. Have much to give." 

It says to the home, " Give freely of self, not 



WISDOM THE PRINCIPAL THING 43 

over much of money, to your children. Anticipate 
the needs of men which may be met and satisfied 
through them. Train them for service, equip them 
for it, yes, consecrate them to it, if need be, by 
your sacrifice." 

It says to the street, " Be honest, that the nation 
may live, that the social order may be preserved, 
that the good name of the people may be exalted 
among the peoples of the earth. Make your gift 
to the future as much as you will in money, but 
more in honor." 

Now in this call to wisdom out of your own 
generation, as I have interpreted it to you, is there 
anything irrational, cowardly or merely pruden- 
tial? Is it not, as I said at the beginning, a brave, 
honest, believing call, the call of the spirit in men 
to the spirit which is in you? I do not say that 
it is a recall from efficiency to morality. I say 
rather that it is a call to morality without which 
there can be no more efficiency. Unless we can 
make the efficient man moral, he has already be- 
come useless. 

I have been speaking of the present call to wis- 
dom as a special call to the trained mind of your 
generation. It has to do with all men everywhere, 
but it is most insistent and urgent wherever it 
can get a hearing among men of trained power. 
To you, and to men like you all over the land, it 



44 PERSONAL POWER 

is saying, " Do not sell your minds. Self-respect- 
ing independence is above price. A man is of no 
value to himself who is not free. 

" Be consistent in the use of mental power. Never 
discharge your minds of their obligation to the 
truth. At whatever stage you deal with material 
values, deal honestly. 

" Do not live in the selfish employment of the 
present. Think, plan, work, sacrifice for the fu- 
ture. Be sure that something about you that you 
have said, or done, or suffered goes over into the 
service and remembrance of men." 

Thus interpreted is not the ancient word true 
to-day ; so true that no man can deny its premises 
nor evade its conclusion, — " Wisdom is the prin- 
cipal thing : therefore get wisdom : yea with all 
thy getting get understanding." 



IV 

THE UNEARNED INCREMENT IN MODERN LIFE 

" I say unto you, That unto every one which hath shall he given." 
— Luke xix, 26, 

I arrest the saying of Jesus at this point that 
we may fix our minds upon the growing import 
of these particular words. I would withhold your 
thought, for the time, from the conclusion of the 
saying — "from him that hath not, even that he 
hath shall be taken away from him " ; for, rela- 
tively, the first part of this saying has a far wider 
application to-day than the second part. 

The moral significance of modern life is not 
found in any easy contrast between gain and loss. 
It is still terrible to watch the relentless process of 
diminution which is going on in many commu- 
nities, the diminution sometimes of estate, some- 
times of personality itself, affecting both individ- 
uals and families. But the process of gain, almost 
as inevitable as that of loss, which is going on all 
around us, is becoming more and more startling 
in its effect upon individual and social life. This 
process has about it many of the characteristics 
of a physical law. In the impersonality of its 
working, in its absolute indifference to the indi- 



46 PERSONAL POWER 

vidual, it may bring forces to bear upon him over 
which he has no sufficient control, and overwhelm 
him with gains of which he is not the master. 

In fact the conditions of modern life, whether 
you apply the term modern to democracy or to 
civilization or to Christianity, open the way to un- 
limited gains on the part of the individual. The 
vast majority living under these conditions have 
so much — are so well born, that is, and trained, 
and in many ways endowed — that much more 
must be given to them, not earned by them, but 
given to them. The process is at work, as I have 
said, with startling effect in many cases. It works 
with the inevitableness of law. " Unto every one 
that hath shall be given.' ' He cannot escape the 
gain. Expressed in terms of current speech, the 
moral danger which besets us is from the un- 
earned increment in modern life. 

We have, of course, the most evident result of 
this process within the region of wealth, where we 
now have a class, a very large class, from whose 
lives the element of struggle has been entirely elim- 
inated, and even the element of ordinary care. 
The struggle for existence is too remote to be 
conceived of. There is no outlet for activity or 
invention except in amusement. 

Another evident result is to be seen within the 
region of knowledge, where we have a very much 



UNEARNED INCREMENT IN MODERN LIFE 47 

larger class whose general intelligence is out of 
all proportion to the effort on their part to acquire 
knowledge. A very little education with no ap- 
proach to learning brings the whole world of ideas 
and facts to any one's door ; and out of the con- 
fusion of this almost impersonal kind of intelli- 
gence we have to evolve public opinion, which for 
this reason is still so often merely a moral or im- 
moral sentiment, not an intellectual conclusion. 
It is not the result of any verified information 
nor even of reflection. 

And still another result is to be seen within 
the region of morals and religion, where we have 
greatly extended the range of what may be termed 
reputation, or accepted character. The church, 
with its old sharp distinction of membership, finds 
itself in the presence of the Christianized, or at 
least, moralized, community. 

Of course, the action of this law of gain becomes 
less definite and certain as you pass from the out- 
ward to the inward life, but it is at work every- 
where. This, I say, is the peculiar significance of 
modern society. The change is so significant that 
we must learn to adjust ourselves to it morally. 
We used to say that the stream of life ran against 
the individual. We used to tell him that if he 
dropped his oar, or lessened his stroke, the cur- 
rent would sweep him down. We cannot say that 



48 PERSONAL POWER 

any longer to a great many persons, perhaps not 
to the average person. The social current is with 
him. It is carrying some along, as we have seen, 
with no effort on their part, and others with no 
effort which can take the name of strenuousness. 
The really strenuous life is far below, down where 
the struggle for existence is going on, or far be- 
yond, if not above, out in the hot competitions 
of the world, or remote from both in those soli- 
tary places where men have learned to think pa- 
tiently, or to act with resolution and sacrifice. 

I am intent upon the adjustment of our moral 
ideas and actions to this change of situation which 
we are now considering. We are still concerned 
with the man who has not, from whom even that 
which he hath is being taken away. But we need 
to be more concerned than heretofore with the 
man who has, to whom it shall be given. That 
person is in the midst of us. He is any one of us. 
What shall we say to him, what shall a man say 
to himself as he begins to be conscious upon re- 
flection that he is more in danger from the cer- 
tainty of gain than from the possibility of loss ? 

I will try to be as definite as possible in the 
answer to this question. I begin by reminding 
you how close is the moral connection between 
all outward gain and personal effort. Personal 
effort may make the gain absolutely immoral if 



UNEARNED INCREMENT IN MODERN LIFE 49 

the end or the method be bad, but usually per- 
sonal effort is the chief moral safeguard in the 
process of gain. We do not reckon the moral risk 
as great in the making of a fortune as in the in- 
heriting of a fortune. The danger in the latter 
case is that the moral connection between posses- 
sion and work will be broken. The inheritor of 
a fortune may put as much of his better self into 
the administering of it, as his predecessor put of 
his better self into the making of it ; or (he alone 
has the alternative) he may squander and dissi- 
pate it with the inevitable reaction upon his own 
character. The danger is so great that it is always 
a matter of surprise when a fortune passes through 
three or four generations and leaves the moral 
strength of a family unimpaired. 

Apply the same test to the inheritance of 
knowledge or of the means of knowledge. One 
enters college, the place of his intellectual in- 
heritance. What will he do there ? Will he keep 
or will he break the moral connection between 
possession and work ? I always think of this as 
the supreme moral question in any one's college 
course. A college represents the means of know- 
ledge within easy possession. It stands for the 
long gains of thought, for the constant proving 
of methods, for the accumulation of the agencies 
and instruments of knowledge, for the presence 



50 PERSONAL POWER 

of guides, helpers, and friends. As is often said, 
no one can go through college without gaining 
much from his associations. What he gets in this 
way is the unearned increment of his life. Is that 
enough, if that be all, to satisfy the situation 
morally? Is that enough to offset the moral de- 
terioration that is always going on when one is 
working below his powers? Can one afford to 
take the risk of four years of infidelity to duty, 
of indifference to work, of contempt for ambi- 
tion ? Can he afford to take the risk of becoming 
a shirk or a cheat, because something must come 
to him, through his associations, do what he will, 
neglect what he will ? Do you not see that the 
great morality of college life centres just where 
the morality of all modern life centres, around 
this question of the correspondence between work 
and possession ? 

Is there any better test than this of the moral- 
ity of modern Christianity ? What is the differ- 
ence between the nominal christian and the real 
christian? The nominal christian is the person 
who lives altogether upon the gains of Christian- 
ity. To the extent to which he is a christian, he 
can hardly help being a christian. His Christian- 
ity is purely a matter of assent, or rather of the 
absence of denial. It is practically necessary to- 
day for a man to do something, or write some- 



UNEARNED INCREMENT IN MODERN LIFE 51 

thing, which may put some anti-christian label 
upon him, to be reckoned as other than a chris- 
tian man. The real christian is the man who puts 
something of himself into his Christianity, who 
contributes something of himself to the common 
Christianity. The range of action here is very 
wide : it runs far beyond all conventional limits ; 
it includes all whom Dr. Bushnell used to desig- 
nate as the " outside saints." But it falls within 
the principle, which we are now explaining, that 
there must be a proper correspondence between 
personal effort of some kind and possession, to 
give moral value to one's possessions. There is 
just as much moral danger from religion, where 
religion is made too easy, as from any of the 
greater things which to-day are given to men. 

But our question has a much wider outlook. 
If " unto every one that hath shall be given," 
what is the source of the gift, whence comes the 
gain? Is it impersonal or personal? Are there 
those who represent in any special way the earn- 
ing power of the generation, or who control its 
gains? I think that you will agree that in making 
this inquiry we touch upon the most manifest 
inconsistency of our time. We assume that we 
represent the nearest approach to equality which 
the world has seen, and yet there never was a time 
when power of every kind, which makes for gain, 



52 PERSONAL POWER 

was at such a remove from the many. Very few 
people control the property which they own, 
further than to shift it from one investment to 
another. The most advanced thinking must be 
done by those who have the special means and 
appliances for investigation. And the best action 
of the world, so far as it is organized, is carried on 
by those who have committed themselves to some 
specialized activity. The modern saint is about 
as highly specialized as the modern scholar. The 
control of affairs, the determination of thought, 
the maintenance of sentiment, are with the few, 
not with the many. In fact, so marked is this 
peculiarity of modern life that it raises a distinct 
moral issue of its own, which we cannot ignore. 
We have been speaking about the moral atti- 
tude of a man to his own work, and the part 
which he ought to take in the gainful process 
which is going on about him, and ministering to 
him, if he is to have any moral value in his posses- 
sions. But side by side with this question lies 
the question of one's moral attitude to those who 
are at work for him, who are doing the work he 
cannot do, who are making his gains, the effect 
of which is of mighty concern to him. Let us 
look into the matter a little. Certainly more than 
half the property of this community is not under 
its immediate control. If a man receives a divi- 



UNEARNED INCREMENT IN MODERN LIFE 53 

dend, he does not know how far it represents 
honest and how far dishonest gain, whether any 
part of it stands for unrequited labor or untaxed 
value. He cannot guarantee it to his conscience* 
And what is true of property is true of many of 
those interests which go to make up that part 
of ourselves which lies outside our personal con- 
trol. Have we then no responsibility, no moral 
obligations, in this outer region of possession 
and interest? No one would say that. But what 
we all feel is that our moral force, if not our moral 
sense, is largely undeveloped in this direction. 
We seem to lose moral discernment as we pass 
from personal conduct into the social order. 

President Hadley quoted recently the opinion 
of an English economist to the effect that the 
standard of personal morality in America is de- 
cidedly higher than in England, that of com- 
mercial morality probably a little lower, and that 
of political morality quite distinctly lower, — an 
opinion which he indorsed and enforced by add- 
ing that we, as a people, do not yet know what 
virtues must be exercised for the maintenance of 
organized society, as well as we know what vir- 
tues are necessary to the harmonious living of 
individuals among their neighbors. As any one 
can see, we have not yet learned how to apply 
moral power far beyond the range of our per- 



54 PERSONAL POWER 

sonal actions. We do not know how to act with 
dignity and authority toward those who have 
more to do with the outward concerns of our 
lives, than we have to do with them ourselves. 
At present we are in the stage of captious criti- 
cism, complaint, and protest. This is always a 
transient, a preliminary stage. The moral out- 
come must be positive. It will become positive, 
but the present condition shows us how much 
we have to do to reach this result. 

I do not know that we are in the habit of 
thinking that the moral behavior of people, es- 
pecially religious people, toward those who repre- 
sent the intellectual earnings of the time, is a 
part of the same moral immaturity. I have said 
that the most advanced thinking must be done 
by those who have the means and appliances for 
investigation. But the majority of good people 
are still afraid of investigation. They have forced 
the church, even in our time, into some ignoble 
positions. It is always ignoble to be obliged to 
surrender to truth in the form of intellectual 
progress. But such a surrender is no infrequent 
occurrence. Soon or late, the church acknow- 
ledges its scholars and thinkers. Soon or late, it 
acknowledges all scholars and thinkers who make 
their contribution to truth. Better, would it not 
be, the spiritual insight or the spiritual courage 



UNEARNED INCREMENT IN MODERN LIFE 55 

which anticipates, if it cannot fully welcome, the 
inevitable result? It will always stand to the 
credit of Mr. Moody, a sign of his moral matu- 
rity, that he was not afraid of the fellowship of 
Henry Drummond and George Adam Smith. 

Carry the thought into a still higher region. 
Consider how separate and distinct, how remote 
the most of us are, from the valiant and sacri- 
ficing workers in the world. Here and there 
among us there is the relation of personal inti- 
macy or of material and moral support, but how 
rarely is the relation so well established as to 
allow any return of spiritual quickening. The 
actual remoteness of the more heroic lives and 
their work seems to increase with the means 
of communication with them. When Benjamin 
Snow, a graduate of Bowdoin, and his wife, went 
out to Micronesia to begin their marvelous work 
for the redemption of the people of those islands, 
they were at a year's remove by mail, and yet 
they and their work were followed by multitudes 
in this country whose lives were visibly affected 
by their heroism. Now we are in daily communi- 
cation with all the heroic work of the world, but 
there is very little moral intimacy with any part 
of it, not enough to get the spiritual reaction 
from it. If any valiant soul falls, or if his cause 
perishes, the fact makes only a momentary im- 



56 PERSONAL POWER 

pression upon us. And yet we know that if a 
thousand of the most self-denying and self-sacri- 
ficing men and women among us should give 
over their work, a darkness would fall upon the 
land, which no light of learning could disperse. 
They are necessary to us, they represent the un- 
earned spiritual increment of our lives. But we 
fail to make any moral contact with them. How 
many of us, I repeat, know any brave, self-deny- 
ing, inspiring work with such interest that we 
should miss it out of our lives if it should fail ? 
Are we not conscious that we are living, for 
the most part, in the moral commonplace, when 
the world is full of moral quickenings for us, if 
we knew how to come under their power? 

I am speaking altogether with the intent of 
pointing out the state of moral irresponsibility 
in which we live, so far as that part of our lives 
is concerned, in which the greatest material gains 
may be taking place, or in which the greater 
moral possibilities lie. I am trying to show you 
that this is the condition of modern life, a condi- 
tion in which we have not yet made ourselves at 
home morally. Modern life appears to be open, 
accessible in every part, full of appliances for 
bringing men and peoples into close and vital con- 
tact. Really modern life is a thoroughly organ- 
ized system of assumed and delegated powers, of 



UNEARNED INCREMENT IN MODERN LIFE 57 

separate functions, of distinct and remote spheres 
of action. It is very hard to act with moral effi- 
ciency outside the routine of our daily duty. It 
is difficult to understand those who represent the 
advanced thought of the time, to understand 
them well enough not to fear them. It is difficult 
to come near enough to the noble and more 
saintly lives about us to catch inspiration from 
them. Here is the perplexity, the inconsistency 
of modern life. Our gains come to us from ap- 
parently inaccessible sources. The problem before 
us is twofold : first, how to invade this outer 
world where our material gains lie, to make sure 
that they are honest gains ; and then, how to get 
access to it on the spiritual side, to make sure of 
direct spiritual results. The problem is not al- 
together new. It has always existed, — Christ 
summed it up in one of his great sayings : " A 
man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the 
things which he possesseth." And the best and 
bravest souls of all time have tried to act accord- 
ing to the meaning of this saying. They have 
tried with one consent to maintain the mighty 
struggle for personality in the midst of posses- 
sion. 

" Even in a palace life may be led well." 
I will not pause to suggest any secondary ways 
in which we may fitly try to meet our difficulties. 



58 PERSONAL POWER 

The essential way seems to me to lie in the re- 
maining thought which I would urge. If we are 
to maintain ourselves morally, if we are to act 
with moral efficiency in the midst of so great 
outward gains, we must restore and cultivate the 
ancient christian art of losing. The inconsistency 
and perplexity of our condition are met by the 
paradox which Christ loved to repeat : " He that 
will save his life shall lose it, and he that will lose 
his life for my sake shall save it," — a saying 
which Paul caught up and interpreted in his own 
life, "What things were gain to me, these I 
counted loss for Christ " ; " for " meaning here by 
reason of, or for the sake of. By reason of, be- 
cause Christ had made the things to be given up 
of inferior value. Christian losing is never wast- 
ing. It rests upon change of values. It means the 
surrender of the lower to the higher, the less to 
the greater, the thing we have come to care less 
for, to the thing we now care more for. Chris- 
tianity implants the better desire, and then says 
— not till then — adjust your ambitions and pur- 
poses to that. 

Apply the principle to the gains from the ma- 
terial world. Your desires are for money. Money 
is the first thing to you in the world, money, that 
is, as it stands for ease or position or power. How 
are you, with such a desire, going to demand 



UNEARNED INCREMENT IN MODERN LIFE 59 

honesty and justice on the part of those who, at 
a remove from you, control your money ? You 
want large returns. That means indifference to 
the means of gain. The greed which countenances 
dishonesty is hy no means confined to those of 
large possessions. Dishonesty rests upon the spirit 
of greed which is in all our hearts. When we all 
want honesty more than we want large returns 
with some possible dishonesty, we shall have hon- 
esty. We shall have the thing we want most, and 
shall oblige others to give us the thing which we 
want most. 

The real moral work of to-day, then, lies in the 
training of desires ; this is the moral part of edu- 
cation. If education simply trains men to become 
more skillful in taking away from their fellows 
the largest share of lower things, then education 
has become a great immorality. 

I quote from a letter which recently fell under 
my notice, written to a benefactor of education. 
"Now and then," says the writer, "quite possi- 
bly too often, I find floating through my mind 
doubts about the purely moral value of so much 
education as is now being provided for. Nearly 
every time I mix in business affairs, I have the 
fact forced upon my observation that college 
graduates are quite as dishonest and expert 
sharpers as their less fortunate and more igno- 



60 PERSONAL POWER 

rant brothers. I fear that I am gradually becom- 
ing forced to the adoption of a new motto, — 
Fewer churches, less learning, and more honesty. 
How do you like it? " That was the impatient, 
half-earnest word of a well-known lawyer, a gal- 
lant soldier and reformer, and a lover of books 
beyond most scholars. 

The moral end of education is the education of 
desires, helping men, compelling them to want 
higher things. Suppose there should come into 
the mind of people at large a change of values, 
not as the result of depression or adversity, but 
because there had come a new sense of the value 
of the things of the spirit. Men are not dishon- 
est as touching the things which are above them, 
only as touching the things which are below 
them. What if the mind of this people should 
be lifted if only by a little, what if ambitions born 
above the plane of materialism should become the 
controlling ambitions? What chance would dis- 
honesty, great or small, have in such atmosphere ? 
Is it impossible to make our method of education 
work to this end, — the enrichment of the com- 
mon life through the ennobling of desires? 

But we will not overestimate the moral power 
of education. There is a mightier power. Paul 
said that he counted his gain as loss, not only 
because Christ had brought new value into his 



UNEARNED INCREMENT IN MODERN LIFE 61 

life, but also because Christ had put a new mo- 
tive into his life. "The life I now live I live 
by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, 
and gave himself for me." Christianity comes 
into modern life not only with its change of 
value, but also with its great and sufficient mo- 
tives. This is still the meaning of personal Chris- 
tianity, of what I called, a little while ago, real 
Christianity. The following of the personal Christ 
at any time, be it small or be it large, is made 
up of those whose hearts are touched with grati- 
tude. They are conscious that Christ has done 
something for them. " Who, though he was rich, 
yet for our sakes became poor, that we through 
his poverty might be made rich." 

Let us not, however, mistake the meaning of 
the following of Christ. We begin to follow Him 
because touched by gratitude ; we continue to fol- 
low Him that we may learn the secret of his life. 
Now the open secret of the life of Christ was the 
sharing of all which was his, and of himself, with 
humanity. I remember that Dr. Dale of Birming- 
ham once said that it seemed to him as if Christ 
felt that his own fortune was bound up in the 
fortune of the human race. That feeling: made 
a heaven unshared impossible to him. That made 
the incarnation necessary. 

The following of Christ is taking his fortune, 



62 PERSONAL POWER 

whose fortune is that of the human race. We can- 
not follow Christ and get away from those who, 
if He were here, would throng his way, if they did 
not crowd his churches. " Inasmuch as ye did it 
not unto the least of these, my brethren, ye did 
it not unto me." We cannot share our gains with 
them and be very far from Him. " Inasmuch as 
ye did it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye 
did it unto me." 

We do not follow Christ by denying ourselves 
knowledge, or strength, or money. Christ was wise, 
strong, and rich, — " who for our sakes became 
poor." If He had been poor and weak and igno- 
rant, He could have done nothing for us. There 
is no such thing as personality devoid of all the 
sources of personal power. First enlarge and en- 
noble your own personality as far as you can to- 
ward " the measure of the stature of the fullness 
of Christ," and then go on your way to meet those 
from whom there is being taken away even that 
which they have. So will you do something to 
recover the ancient christian art of losing, making 
that art at once rational and persuasive. 

I rejoice that you are to enter into one of the 
strong and full generations of the world. Some of 
you will have a large share of its strength and full- 
ness. None of your lives will be scant and meagre 
by the standard of other times. Whatever you 



UNEARNED INCREMENT IN MODERN LIFE 63 

may seem to yourselves to lack, never for a mo- 
ment be envious of any whom you may come to 
know, upon whom power of any kind has been 
thrust in coarse abundance. There is no slavery 
so great as that into which one falls who is 
possessed by wealth, wealth which the owner is 
incapable of using as capital. On the other hand, 
put a right valuation on power of every kind 
which you can use to honorable and satisfying 
ends. And in your estimates of useful power give 
sufficient thought to your own personality. In 
the midst of all the abounding strength of the 
world, the cry is going up on every side, from 
street and from hearth, for men and women cour- 
ageous, joyous, and efficient, unselfishly efficient. 
I do not like to think of any christian virtue 
as being at any time ineffective, but if we had 
the mediaeval saints among us, I do not know 
just what we should do with them. Let us not 
be afraid of our own generation. Let us not be 
betrayed by its standards. But keeping the mas- 
tery of our souls, let us take its gains and learn 
how "to count them loss for Christ." 



PROFESSIONAL VALUES 

" And the voice spake unto him again the second time, What God 
hath cleansed, call not thou common." — Acts x, 15. 

The word of rebuke may be the word of honor. 
To single out a man and say to him — " Whatever 
other men may say or do, you are to say or do the 
better thing" — is at once an acknowledgment 
of his power and a challenge to his faith. Peter, 
you will recall, was educated chiefly by this pro- 
cess. So long as Jesus held him under personal 
training he was continually rebuking him, smiting 
his weaknesses, restraining his waywardness, try- 
ing, to use Peter's own words, " to stablish, 
strengthen, settle" him, in order that he might 
justify in fact what Christ had set before him in 
promise, — " Thou shalt be called Cephas, which 
is by interpretation, a rock." And now Jesus had 
gone away, and in place of his personal pre- 
sence there was the new faith, the new order, which 
men were to call Christianity. Peter was its fore- 
most representative. Could he represent it, in its 
breadth, in its freedom, in its impartial humanity ? 
Peter was just beginning to be a christian. Would 
he relapse into Judaism, and carry the new faith 



PROFESSIONAL VALUES 65 

back with him? The test came at the point of the 
inclusiveness of Christianity. Was it to open its 
doors to every man, or was it to close them against 
the stranger, the alien, the Gentile ? Peter hesi- 
tated. The old distinctions were dominant in his 
mind. How could he, first a Jew and then a chris- 
tian, receive strangers, outsiders, aliens, and eat 
with them? How could he compromise himself 
by contact with the common and unclean ? There 
was need of the same method which Christ had 
used so often. Hence the word of the Vision, as 
if it were the well-known word of the Master, 
"What God hath cleansed, that call not thou 
common." Let others, if they must, abide in their 
narrowness. Stand thou forth in the freedom of 
the christian man. The very fortune of Christian- 
ity, as you see, was apparently dependent upon 
the attitude of Peter to the outside humanity. 
And in turn his attitude was dependent upon his 
sense of the worth of that humanity. If that was 
still common and unclean in his eyes he could do 
nothing for it in a christian way. He must first 
believe and know that God had cleansed it, that 
the incoming of Christ into the race had given it 
a new value, before he could represent or apply 
Christianity. That is what every principle which 
we are asked to affirm, every cause we are asked to 
aid, every work we are asked to do, expects of us, 



66 PERSONAL POWER 

and waits for at our hands, namely, the sufficient 
sense of its value. The unvalued, the undervalued 
work is the work we cannot do, the undervalued 
cause is the cause we cannot serve, the under- 
valued man is the man we cannot save. 

You have now the reason and the motive of 
my subject, Professional Values. I am to try to 
say to you, in as emphatic words as I can use, 
that the various callings of life will give back to 
you, and through you will give out to others, in 
exact proportion to the values which you see in 
them, or can put into them. The great saying of 
Jesus forces itself upon you, " With what judg- 
ment ye judge ye shall be judged, and with what 
measure ye mete it shall be measured to you 
again." I want to have you think of the honor 
implied in such sayings as this, and that of my 
text. They seem to be uttered in the tone of re- 
buke or warning, but they carry in them the high 
distinction of power; they recognize in us the 
ability to actually deal with men and things about 
us according to the values we may find in them, 
and so to get the reward which attends the largest 
valuation. 

What is the ground of professional values? 
What gives distinctive value to a profession? 
First, the degree of attainment required for the 
practice of a profession, determined chiefly by 



PROFESSIONAL VALUES 67 

the character and amount of training for it ; sec- 
ond, the place assigned by common consent to a 
given profession in its ministry to human needs, 
determined chiefly by its nearness to human life. 
The first is the intellectual basis of a profession ; 
the second its moral basis. I shall not delay upon 
the intellectual valuation of the professions. There 
is no possible agreement here. The public can- 
not enter judgment, and professional judgments 
are at variance. The philosopher can be counted 
upon not to overvalue the industry of the in- 
vestigator ; the investigator can be counted upon 
not to overvalue the speculations of the philoso- 
pher. I should not like to be made a judge or 
divider in this matter of professional values on 
the intellectual side. But on the moral side, with, 
which we are now concerned, everybody has the 
right to an opinion, and it is the common opinion 
which is decisive. The principle is well established 
and acknowledged that the professions are to be 
rated in terms of moral value according to their 
nearness to human life, especially to the life of 
the individual. The professions which make the 
most sensitive and vital contact with us person- 
ally are those which we invest with the most seri- 
ousness if not sacredness of purpose. We make 
the greatest demand in personal character upon 
all who enter these professions. We expect the 



68 PERSONAL POWER 

most from them in the crises of our personal 
lives. 

According to this classification the first group 
is made up of the professions of the ministry, of 
teaching, and of medicine. As much as these 
differ, one from another, they have this in common 
that they touch the individual life of the com- 
munity at the most sensitive points. Those who 
enter these professions must think, and act, and 
live close to the lives of others. Hence the very 
peculiar place which they hold in the public es- 
timation. They have the right to assume the 
confidence of the public; they must expect that 
the public will be jealous of their reputation even 
to the point of criticism. There is no danger 
here from the undervaluing of one's profession. 
The whole danger is from professionalism. The 
constant struggle of the minister, the teacher, 
and the doctor is the struggle with the conven- 
tional and artificial. The great sins which are 
open to them, and almost alone to them, are the 
sins of cant, sham, and hypocrisy. The danger 
of these professions indicates their moral advan- 
tage. Those who practice them have the stimulus 
of dealing with the truths of the spiritual and 
physical world; they have the added stimulus 
of the daily contact with the bodies, minds, and 
souls of men. I have not said that the men of 



PROFESSIONAL VALUES 69 

these professions are more essential to human 
welfare than those of some other professions or 
callings. I am saying that they gain the largest 
reflex influence in the way of moral stimulus 
from their work and its human environment. 

Following the principle of classification before 
us, we reach a second group made up of the pro- 
fessions of law and journalism, professions which 
have to do not so much with the individual life 
as with the collective life of the community, with 
the order of society, the stability of government, 
the maintenance of popular rights, the organiz- 
ation and direction of public sentiment. Within 
these professions we are evidently at one remove 
from the close personality of the professions al- 
ready considered. There is not the same steady 
personal impact upon the individual life. There 
may be even the somewhat artificial impersonality 
of the press. Both lawyer and journalist reach 
us through the medium of principles and facts. 
The lawyer interprets, adjusts, and applies those 
principles which insure the public order, and 
strengthen the security of life and possessions. 
The journalist presents, interprets, and applies 
the current fact in its bearing upon the well- 
being and progress of society. I protest against 
the theory that the journalist is merely a pur- 
veyor of news. I do not accept the idealizing 



70 PERSONAL POWER 

statement of Lord Rosebery, who would eliminate 
the editorial page from the newspaper. "I be- 
lieve/' he said recently, "that an ideal paper 
would be a well-arranged i Times ' without the 
leading articles. My idea of journalistic happiness 
would be that we should have advertised and 
called out and brought to our notice nothing but 
truth, un criticised, unmitigated, and undefiled." 
No, not that alone. When the journalist has the 
truth of the fact in his possession and has given 
it to us, his professional work has just begun. 
He is to interpret and apply the current fact. He 
is to use it according to his insight for the de- 
velopment of public sentiment. The professional 
value of journalism lies in opinions as well as in 
facts. A newspaper must have a policy if it would 
satisfy the professional demands upon journalism. 
Newspapers in general do have a policy. The 
chief difference between them is that some make 
the news work the policy, if necessary fit the 
policy, while others, presenting the accessible or 
ascertainable fact, come out into the open field 
of argument and discussion to enforce its teach- 
ings. The journal of opinions, of fair, consistent, 
urgent opinions, is still the journal of influence. 
Notwithstanding Lord Rosebery's sneer at the 
" leading article," the London journal which has 
had more influence than any other foreign journal 



PROFESSIONAL VALUES 71 

in forming public sentiment on foreign issues in 
the United States, is a journal without a scrap 
of news, " The Spectator." This paper has been 
quoted far and wide over the land, and through 
its serious treatment of our new duties to civili- 
zation, its ardent appeals to national pride, its 
generous recognition of our future place in the 
Anglo-Saxon supremacy, has built up a power- 
ful sentiment around these ideas. The senti- 
ments expressed I believe to be more English 
than American, more consistent with the genius 
of the British Empire than of the American Re- 
public, but of their existence and extent there 
can be no more doubt than of the ability and 
efficiency of this contributing cause. 

When we test the profession of the law by its 
relation to human interests, we see that its work, 
though at a remove, is direct and authoritative. 
The law creates the conditions of all human in- 
tercourse. It knows nothing of us as individuals; 
it can say nothing to us as such. But the mo- 
ment one man stands in the presence of another, 
the law enters and dictates what each may or may 
not do, what each may or may not say. In so far 
as we belong to the social order we are the subjects 
of law. The practice of the profession, as it goes 
on in the routine of the courts, affects us all, though 
we may never enter a court or concern ourselves 



72 PERSONAL POWER 

with a single case. We recognize tins fact and 
attach a corresponding moral value to the work- 
ing* of the law. AVe understand that it is its con- 
servatism which insures the continuity of the so- 
cial and political order. AVe understand that its 
even-handed justice is the truest mercy. We un- 
derstand that its very restrictions and vexations 
delays are not by intention for the hinderance of 
honest men, but rather for their defense against 
dishonest men. The moral value of the law is 
seen in the one plain fact that the most terrible 
calamity which can befall a people is the perversion 
of justice. The normal working of law is to- 
ward righteousness, and there is no inconsistency 
between law and liberty. Let me remind yon that 
the burden of the great struggle against slavery, 
preceding the war, fell upon those trained to the 
profession of law. Congress was then made up 
chiefly of members of the legal profession. I be- 
lieve that the struggle for human rights had a 
better chance then than it would have now. The 
men of that time were schooled in principles of 
justice which had so close an alliance with the 
principles of freedom and equality that they could 
not suppress or deny their united pleadings. I 
have just laid down Mr. McCall's " Thaddeus 
Stevens." Mr. Stevens was a lawyer by instinct 
as well as by training, practicing his profession 



PROFESSIONAL VALUES %Z 

till fiftv- vears of a^e, and then surrender- 

pedpowe tepolit- 

ical battle against slavery- His public service was 
the living example of an adVoeate r .: mh- 

if ^ waa in manj irayi a unique man, but he was 
resentative of die spirit of many of bii pro- 
fession in their devotion to liberty. The p:ofes- 
the personal. C *I repose." Mr. .v.-v- 
..'taph. -'in this qptiet and led - 
i p o t . n o t : . - n a t n ral p re £ e r e n r : e I o 

tude. but finding othei cemeteries Inn ted at to 
race by ebai les, I hare c this, that I 

might illustrate in i irinciples which 

I advocated through a long life, the equality of 
man before his Creator." 

It would be ting to trace into the region 

of art the principle which fixes the moral valua- 
tion of a profession. Certain. eat artists, 
whether in sculpture, painting, or 
io their work in the closest possible rela- 
tion to the human. It ividnal life 
alone which they touch, nor the collective life, it 
is the universal life. 

B ut I c a n n o t turn ai o th is at 1 1 a r . 

My thought must follow the torrent erf your 
choices, and th th beyond the recognized 

professions into territory which is afl pet unde- 
fined. The college man of to-dav \ 



74 PERSONAL POWER 

ered by the old classifications. As the analyst of 
the last decade of Yale graduates says, " The typ- 
ical graduate of to-day is no longer a scholar 
but a man of affairs, and he tends to the section 
of the country where the growth of population 
and the concentration of industries offer him the 
greatest opportunities for usefulness and success." 
I am intent upon following this typical grad- 
uate, whether of Yale, or Dartmouth, or any other 
college, that I may ask him, what valuation he 
will put upon his calling. The question is not 
prompted by any professional pharisaism. My 
motive is quite the reverse. I believe that pro- 
fessional values already exist, in many forms of 
business, which await recognition. Will the col- 
lege man see these values and appropriate them, 
or will he allow himself to fall into superficial 
estimates and accept the final and sufficient re- 
ward of his work in money ? Will he carry into 
his choices and methods the true professional 
spirit, or will he adopt the commercial spirit as 
his guide and standard? I will tell you what I 
think the professional spirit ought to do for a 
man. 

It ought to lead him to find his chief satisfac- 
tion in his chosen work rather than in any second- 
ary results from it. Here is a very good test. A 
man does not enter a profession to abandon it as 



PROFESSIONAL VALUES 75 

soon as he can live without it. A profession is in 
his eyes not a temporary means to a livelihood 
nor to a fortune. Men do not retire from the 
practice of a profession as soon as they have a 
competence. That which drew them holds them. 
Professional service like any other must be esti- 
mated, for certain practical uses, in money. But 
the current term in which you may estimate all 
successful service most fairly is not money, but 
reputation. Three of you of equal ability go your 
ways, one into teaching, one into law, one into 
business. You reach the highest positions open to 
you in your separate careers. Forty years hence 
you come back to the college. The undergrad- 
uates of that day will rise up to do you impartial 
honor. A great scholar, a great advocate or ju- 
rist, a great manager of men, in what term can 
you estimate them, except in a term which fits 
the common greatness. Keputation stands, with 
hardly an exception, for character and success, 
and is the result, with hardly an exception, of 
that satisfaction in one's work which enables 
him to get the most out of it, and the most out 
of himself. It is the professional spirit which 
schools a man to find his chief satisfaction in his 
work. 

This same spirit teaches one also to emphasize 
the virtues of his calling. Professional honor is 



76 PERSONAL POWER 

a significant phrase. It means that at certain 
points at least there must be a scrupulous integ- 
rity, a generous sacrifice of self-interest, a sensi- 
tive regard for the rights of others or for the 
common good. Some of the older forms of busi- 
ness have an equivalent kind of honor. Where- 
ever you find that, support it with all your heart; 
wherever it is wanting, labor above all things to 
create it. The business you undertake will be 
worthless to you without it. 

The professional spirit asserts itself most clearly 
in the insistence which it places upon the moral 
element in work. The great callings are intensely 
human, they look straight toward humanity. I 
have often reminded you of the fact that they 
have their rise in, and flow out of truth, justice, 
mercy, the very attributes of God. So far there- 
fore as one comes under the power of the pro- 
fessional spirit he cannot evade the constant 
question, What does my work mean to men ? Is it 
gaining human results ? The question, as you see, 
is far reaching, and it enters into the details of 
one's calling. It is the supreme question to-day 
in the world of affairs. Every business represents 
an aggregation of human lives. The moral part 
of all business involves the proper consideration 
of the lives it controls, not in ways of charity, 
much less in ways of patronage, but through 



PROFESSIONAL VALUES 77 

intelligent and sympathetic helpfulness. At the 
close of the exercises attending the opening of 
the new library and clubhouse at Wilder, a 
statement was read by the remaining partner of 
the original firm of Wilder Brothers, to the effect 
that negotiations for the transfer of the works to 
the International Paper Company had been de- 
layed for a year until sufficient assurances could 
be given that in the transfer the workmen would 
suffer no loss. That statement, read at the open- 
ing of this workmen's clubhouse, illustrates to 
my mind the meaning of business philanthropy. 
You naturally ask me if the world of affairs 
will allow this invasion of the professional spirit, 
if it be such as I have described it. Why not? 
Who control that world except those who live in 
it ? If any of you are to take up your residence 
there, you will have all the rights of citizenship 
in it, the right to vote, to speak, to act. The 
world of affairs is not a hostile world. It is 
to-day inviting the incoming of college men. 
True, it is the intellectual training which they 
are supposed to bring which is most wanted, but 
I am persuaded that the moral purpose is not un- 
welcome. Entering there without arrogance or 
assumption, college men will not be asked to be 
disloyal to their ideals. They may or may not be 
able to open new professions. That no one can 



78 PERSONAL POWER 

foretell. The profession of civil engineering has 
always maintained an honorable and undisputed 
place there, and it is making it possible for men 
of like training and attainments and purposes to 
occupy adjacent territory. The departments of 
production and distribution, to which I have re- 
ferred, are certainly beginning to require a pre- 
paration as exacting as professional study, and to 
offer fields for essentially professional practice. 
No one would say that economic questions are 
less intricate than legal or political questions. 
We have discussed for a good many years the 
place of the educated man in politics. Where are 
the centres of political activity to-day? I should 
say unhesitatingly, in our cities, and in connec- 
tion with their affairs. But municipal politics are 
business politics, cities are corporations. The 
science of government is fast becoming the sci- 
ence of administration. The science of adminis- 
tration is a fit subject for professional study, 
and when that fact is fully recognized, the field 
of administration will be the field for profes- 
sional practice. We shall some time have a public 
service at home and abroad which will reach the 
stability and the dignity of a profession. 

What can our colleges give to this world of 
affairs? Not ready-made talent. Everyman must 



PROFESSIONAL VALUES 79 

serve his apprenticeship. His intellectual train- 
ing must be adjusted to affairs. But intellectual 
force is not the sole contribution. It was not 
and is not the sum and substance of the contri- 
bution to the professions. What is given to these 
is intellectual power informed to a greater or less 
degree by moral purpose. 

A member of the House of Lords in present- 
ing Mr. Cecil Ehodes to the stockholders of the 
South African Company spoke of him as "a man 
of splendid ideas and of undefeated action." That 
was a fine thing to say of any man. But I should 
like to mend the saying a bit. I would rather be 
able to say of a leader, he is a man of splendid 
ideals and of undaunted action. The idea is in- 
cluded in the ideal, but it does not fill it. The 
intellectual must exist in commanding force, but 
it must have moral stimulus and support. The 
idea can charm, fascinate, awaken, and stir us. 
The ideal can do all that. It can also command, 
challenge, and rebuke us. It can call the whole 
man into its service and hold his face to the 
light. I should rather say undaunted in place of 
undefeated action. There are things which are 
more to be desired than immediate success. The 
man who worships success will sometimes fall in 
pieces before his idol. The possibility of early 



80 PERSONAL POWER 

defeat, in place of unworthy success, must be 
provided for in education. We want to send the 
undaunted man, with his ideals, into the world 
of affairs. For any such man I have no fear of 
the final success, nor of the final welcome. 



VI 

THE DISTRIBUTION OF PERSONAL POWER 

" Freely ye have received, freely give." — Matthew x, 8. 

The shortening of the receptive period is a marked 
characteristic of modern education. The tendency 
is toward those methods through which the ex- 
ceptional student passes into the specialist. I am 
not now concerned to inquire into the educational 
value of the change, to ask, for example, to what 
extent it has actually advanced the stage of intel- 
lectual and moral maturity. The effect of which 
I wish to take note is seen in the increased eager- 
ness, often impatience, of college men to be at 
work, in their readiness to assume responsibility, 
and in the growing consciousnessofpersonalpower. 
This fact explains in part, I think, the quicken- 
ing pace of modern life. One generation presses 
hard upon another. A man is no sooner about 
his own work than he hears behind him the eager 
cry of the oncoming generation. 

Speaking now to this present fact without pass- 
ing judgment upon it, I proceed to discuss with 
you one of the more advanced questions within 
the field of giving, — namely, the question of the 
Distribution of Personal Power. When men be- 



82 PERSONAL POWER 

gin to think more about doing and giving than 
about receiving, it is time to talk with them about 
doing and giving. 

Where shall a man give of himself ? There may 
be demands which he may not acknowledge as im- 
perative. There may be obligations which he ought 
not to ignore or diminish. Let me try to help you 
toward a clear and honorable discrimination in the 
use of personal power. I will say, however, at the 
beginning, to avoid any possible misapprehension 
of my meaning, that the essential word in my text 
is the word " freely." " Freely ye have received, 
freely give." The discrimination which I am to 
urge upon you does not mean how much or how 
little of a man. The law of effective giving allows 
no such division. A man must learn how to give 
the whole of himself. I count this the secret of 
all success, as it is certainly the secret of all in- 
fluence. We put the calculating man only a grade 
above the insincere man. If we have the right to 
a man at all we feel that we have the right to him 
at his best. You can test this feeling in so simple 
a matter as that of attention. You resent the in- 
different, listless, unsympathetic attitude of a per- 
son more than you resent refusal. We do not get 
very far into life until we learn how costly a thing 
it is to live. The progress of the world is carefully 
registered, could we but see it, in the expenditure 



DISTRIBUTION OF PERSONAL POWER 83 

of personal power. " Freely ye have received" — 
that means that somebody gave freely, gave of 
himself to you. "Freely give" — that means, 
maintain the great succession. Pass on good gifts 
to men. Pour out of yourselves into the heart of 
the world. 

Assuming that there is but one answer to the 
question, if anybody is disposed to ask it, how 
much or how little shall I give of myself — give 
all — there is abundant room, as any one can see, 
for the question about the distribution of personal 
power. 

My first answer to this question is, that it is not 
only a personal duty, but equally a social and 
public duty, for a man to attend to his own busi- 
ness. Every honorable business honorably con- 
ducted is a contribution to society. Other men 
are the richer for the honest, enterprising trader 
in the community. Other men's homes are the safer 
for the presence of the skillful doctor. I do not 
know why we should limit the public service to 
office holding, or think of an office as a trust be- 
yond any legitimate and necessary business. The 
distinction is harmful. It is not true. Lawyer, ed- 
itor, doctor, teacher, minister, merchant, producer, 
all these men touch me and my neighbors, sen- 
sitively and permanently. I am concerned in the 
quality of their work, its intellectual and its moral 



84 PERSONAL POWER 

quality. Sharp practice at the bar, the ignorant 
practice of medicine, insincere or uninspiring 
preaching, sensational journalism, unbusinesslike 
business of any kind, these things cheapen the 
life of a community. They make it poor and mean. 
They affect values as directly as taxation or the 
tariff. I would as soon live under a bad govern- 
ment as in a community where the professions 
and business had gone over into the hands of weak 
or scheming men. All of which goes to show how 
much of a man's time, invention, enthusiasm, and 
conscience his own work may absorb in the interest 
of others. All private business rightly conducted 
is public service. Let no man be diverted from 
the necessary attention to his own business by 
any demands from without. In the language of 
political authority, that is paramount. 

My further answer is that in the distribution of 
personal power allowance must be made for some 
kind of personal identification with those things 
which are of recognized value in society. I use 
the term identification because it is at once broad 
and decisive. It does not prescribe definite method 
or form ; it does assume a very definite attitude 
of support. Any one who has occasion to analyze 
society is constantly reminded of the unfairness 
in the distribution of social burdens. Social bur- 
dens are carried upon the shoulders of the willing, 



DISTRIBUTION OF PERSONAL POWER 85 

not altogether upon the shoulders of the able. A 
very considerable minority withdraws itself, either 
through thoughtlessness or selfishness. The criti- 
cism is often passed upon college graduates that 
they are slow in taking up the social duties of the 
community in which they may place themselves. 
There are various reasons which may be given for 
this hesitancy, reasons which in some cases may 
be sufficient, but the criticism is worthy of atten- 
tion. 

A young man is apt to make two mistakes in 
his estimate of organized society. His first mis- 
take is in underestimating the value of the con- 
ventional, the institutional. Institutions acquire 
faults like men, but they are the faults of great- 
ness not of littleness. Before anything can become 
an institution it must have attained to great di- 
mensions, reaching, as Milton says of the state, up 
to "the stature of an honest man." Institutions 
may fail in some present emergency, but they 
stand for the best which men have thought, or 
done, or suffered. They are rich in the wealth of 
humanity. They are as generous as they are 
wealthy. A university has recently been defined 
as the " means by which the highest culture of 
one generation is best transmitted to the ablest 
youths of the next." More than this might be said 
of the church, because it is deeper in its sources 



86 PERSONAL POWER 

and wider in its reach. The man who fails to 
honor, to reverence institutions, fails because he 
lacks the historic sense, imagination, and insight. 
A second mistake is in underestimating the 
need of support on the part of institutions. As 
they were built up by effort and struggle and sac- 
rifice they must be maintained through the use 
of the human, the personal. And those who are 
maintaining them need constant reinforcement. I 
wish that I could make plain to you the welcome 
which awaits every well-qualified young man who 
proposes to identify himself with the institutions 
of any community, be it in city or country. It is 
not simply one more worker. It is the incoming 
of a fresh invigorating presence. As in a political 
body, hedged in, it may be, by traditions, let a 
strong, courageous, earnest man speak out, and 
men may listen all the more eagerly if they have 
to ask his name. I am not contradicting what I 
said a little while ago about attending to one's 
business. Our social obligations, certainly at first, 
do not make great demands upon us. They do 
not ask for large time or great gifts of any sort. 
They ask for what I have called identification, — 
the support that is of interest, sympathy, and in- 
fluence. And it is not wise to ignore their re- 
quest. A young man cannot afford to leave a 
community long in doubt as to his position on 



DISTRIBUTION OF PERSONAL POWER 87 

plain vital matters. A too politic introduction of 
himself will certainly react upon him. He will 
not easily remove that first impression of moral 
indifference or of calculation. One cannot begin 
too early to establish his reputation, to tell his 
fellow men where he stands, to give them the data 
on which they may fix his social value. 

I advance one step further in my answer and 
into a somewhat different region. In the distri- 
bution of personal power I lay very great stress 
upon the value of personal opinion, opinion which 
has the worth of the man in it. Public opinion is 
in theory and in fact the ruling force in a demo- 
cracy. Who make public opinion? Usually those 
who have the most to contribute to it. It is at no 
time a matter of mere numbers. Even when the mob 
is in power the average man on the outside counts 
for more than the average man on the inside, ex- 
cept as the latter is more capable of being welded 
into the mass through some strong leader. A great 
leader must rely more upon knowledge than upon 
ignorance. That is the long fact. The essential 
thing is to see that it is not the merely cunning 
and crafty ones who rule. This can be prevented 
by making public opinion more worthy of itself, 
by allowing nothing which belongs to it to be 
withdrawn or withheld. 

The three sufficient factors in public opinion 



88 PERSONAL POWER 

are intelligence, sympathy, and courage. The pro- 
portion in which these are needed depends of 
course upon the subject on which opinion is to be 
exercised, but it is seldom if ever that any one 
can be left out, — intelligence to discern and 
measure the question at issue, sympathy to inter- 
pret and represent the interests of those concerned 
in it, and courage to uphold the idea or principle 
which may be involved. Let us never commit the 
error of supposing that courage is nourished and 
grows strong on anything lower than an idea or 
principle. Men do not fight for things until they 
idealize them. They relate them to rights, justice, 
and freedom; then they do battle for them. Hamp- 
den did not fight against the royal tax, he fought 
for liberty. I do not know at what point educated 
men are most likely to fail in their contribution 
to public opinion, but I have no doubt that some 
of them fail at the point of intelligence. A great 
scholar may be grossly ignorant of current affairs, 
or his opinion may be so immature as to be utterly 
impracticable. I commend to you a good news- 
paper as one of your future text-books. You can 
do nothing, say nothing, think nothing of any 
public value without current facts. With these in 
possession and well considered you have the right 
to express yourself in criticism, or if need be in 
protest. I do not speak of the expression of ap- 



, DISTRIBUTION OF PERSONAL POWER 89 

proval of public measures, for it has come to be 
understood that silence is acquiescence. It is only 
the unexpected, or exceptional, which is not sat- 
isfied with approval, which calls for applause. 

As a compensation for the scholar who with- 
draws from the facts of common concern that he 
may pursue his un vexed study, we have in increas- 
ing numbers the expert whose work lies adjacent 
to the public needs. It is not generally under- 
stood how many college instructors are employed 
in the editorial work of the daily papers, or how 
frequent is the call for college men to leave their 
chairs of instruction and engage in journalism. 
The demand for writers of this class has become 
so great as to be appreciable in its effect upon 
the teaching force in colleges and universities. A 
further demand, which has been honorably met, 
has called to the aid of the government trained 
men whose knowledge of foreign peoples, or of 
foreign affairs, has been timely and helpful. The 
number of commissions recently appointed shows 
the amount and range of talent outside its own 
force, within easy call of the government. Oppor- 
tunities are not wanting for capable men to deter- 
mine public policies. Nothing can be more legiti- 
mate or honorable than the acceptance of these 
opportunities. But for the most part the man who 
remains at his own post, and attends to his own 



90 PERSONAL POWER 

business, must exert his influence within the realm 
of opinion. There the opportunity is sufficient, 
and the duty is imperative. I cannot overestimate 
the influence in any community of the man of sane 
judgment, of broad sympathies, and of consistent 
action. It is much to know what men think whose 
words do not run in the current gossip. " The 
heart of the wise teacheth his mouth, and addeth 
learning to his lips." But there are times when 
opinions and words are insufficient, when the man 
who would meet his full obligation must act. The 
man whose opinions are deep enough to be con- 
victions may, and probably will, have occasion to 
test them. There are disagreeable duties to be met 
in every community, if one is really in earnest 
about the public good. It does not make them 
pleasant to say that they are in the interest of re- 
form. The way of the reformer is about as hard 
as the way of the transgressor. But it is not to be 
shunned if it opens naturally out of one's daily 
path. It has been said that one condition of as- 
suming responsibility is the capacity to bear suf- 
fering and to inflict suffering. Opinions which 
mean anything may become costly. They may 
reach into those values which are usually expressed 
in terms of conscience. 

I am not inclined to go further in indicating 
the immediate and direct distribution of personal 



DISTRIBUTION OF PERSONAL POWER 91 

power. Whoever attends to his own business in 
such way that he renders thereby a public serv- 
ice; whoever identifies himself positively and 
helpfully with the institutions of society ; who- 
ever makes his opinion a worthy factor in public 
opinion, supporting it, if need be, by vigorous 
and timely action, satisfies in the main the claims 
which ought to be made upon him personally. 
And in doing these things he has the right to 
the approval of his own conscience. But there is 
still a point beyond all this, of which I take note, 
at which personal power gives way to delegated 
power. It may not be possible to draw the clear 
line between personal and delegated power ; but 
we certainly do reach a limit beyond which we 
can do better to trust others, to act through 
others, to turn over authority to others, than to 
attempt further extension of our own powers. 
The principle of delegated power is reaching 
back more and more into the field of personal 
responsibility and action. The process of division 
and subdivision is going on in the field of per- 
sonal responsibility corresponding to the same 
process in the general field of work. The motive 
of this reduction is not the relief of the indi- 
vidual, but the greater public good. The public 
good requires definite and permanent service 
within manageable areas. 



92 PERSONAL POWER 

The territory within which we have been most 
reluctant to recognize the working of this prin- 
ciple has been that of politics. We were for long 
time content to allow a good many things to be 
done poorly for the sake of giving the greatest 
numbers the chance of doing them. We reasoned 
that it was undemocratic to restrict political oc- 
cupations, certainly to apply to them the rules of 
ordinary business. But gradually we yielded to 
the law of delegated power. Democracy could 
not withstand principles older than itself and 
more universal. We have come to see that we 
must require qualifications for the service of the 
state, if the state is to maintain its authority and 
extend its influence. We have not come to see, or 
to understand in full measure, that the principle 
of delegated power must be accepted even if it 
does not satisfy the ideals or possible results of 
personal power. There was a time when the citi- 
zens of Boston organized themselves into a watch- 
and-ward society to protect the town. They pa- 
trolled the streets at night. They made arrests and 
executed the laws according to their judgment. 
Doubtless the personal standard of that early 
watch-and-ward society was somewhat above that 
of the present police of the city, possibly the laws 
were better administered at its hands, but nobody 
supposes that any like arrangement could now 



DISTRIBUTION OF PERSONAL POWER 93 

protect the city. We outgrow more quickly than 
we think the limits of personal or associated 
action, in distinction from organized and dele- 
gated action. 

I suppose that we still overestimate the effect 
of the personal element in the reconstruction and 
purification of politics. The casual entrance of 
an outside man into party politics has little or no 
meaning beyond that of indorsement. He must 
be in and of the party, a permanent and persist- 
ent force, to effect any change. We have tried to 
introduce the element of political independence 
into our political system. We have met with 
varying results. The chief difficulty in the way 
of making independent action effective has been 
the inequality between the great political parties 
since the Civil War. A strong, alert, and consist- 
ent opposition is the condition of safe govern- 
ment by party. It was a national misfortune that 
the Democratic party lost its power of effective 
opposition through its attitude on slavery, and 
again through its attitude on the currency. The 
independent in politics is a force so long as he 
holds the balance of power. When he takes the 
open field, he must organize or fail ; and organiza- 
tion means, as I have said, much more than asso- 
ciation, it means in the end delegated power. We 
are practically committed, except in local affairs, 



94 PERSONAL POWER 

to party government. It is the English as distin- 
guished from the Continental method. The alter- 
native is government by groups and cliques. 
Must we then submit to the slavery of party ? 
Why should we? We do not allow delegated 
power elsewhere to become a tyranny. Why 
should we here ? Because it is necessary, and on 
the whole the strongest and best thing, to act 
through great parties, to which representative 
principles and policies may be committed, are we 
bound to tolerate and indorse corruption ? The 
answer thus far has been tolerance up to a very 
high limit, then revolt or rebellion ; in municipal 
politics the occasional overturning usually of tem- 
porary significance ; in national politics the occa- 
sional transfer of power from one party to another 
in the way of rebuke. Have we no better outlook 
than the repetition of these results? Have we 
gone to the root of the matter in placing our 
reliance upon reform and in training reformers ? 
Why not recognize politics as a business, as a 
profession? Why not train men to do the busi- 
ness right in the first instance ? Why not start 
in with the idea of making a good politician 
instead of a reformer? Why allow so noble a 
science as politics to be broken up and to fall in 
pieces between the "statesman" and the "politi- 
cian " ? If the real power, delegated power, lies 



DISTRIBUTION OF PERSONAL POWER 95 

in party, then put your man, your whole man, in 
the seat of power. If that is the seat of author- 
ity, make it a place, if not the place, of honor. 

But you say to me, do you mean just this ? 
Would you advise us to go into practical politics 
as you would advise us to go into business or the 
professions ? That is just what I want to say. I 
can see no more honorable or inviting opportu- 
nity for a firm and patient ambition than muni- 
cipal, or, under certain conditions, national poli- 
tics. The apprenticeship is long. Temptations are 
not lacking. But the way is open. Difficulties are 
not insurmountable. If a good man gives the 
same attention to business that a bad man gives 
he is more likely to succeed. The only drawback 
to a noble success in American politics is the 
unwillingness of the people to acknowledge, and 
rightly estimate the fact, that politics represents 
delegated power, that it is too large a thing to 
be possessed through the inroads of personal en- 
thusiasm. Politics is a territory to be occupied, 
where men may make their habitation, and live 
honestly, and be held in honor by their fellow 
men. The scholar may go into politics, if he will, 
but let him go there to gain a residence. Let him 
go to learn as well as to teach. Let him keep his 
faith in men, but let him be patient with them. 
Let him accept honor and rejoice in it, but let 



96 PERSONAL POWER 

him rejoice most in the service he can render. 
Let him stand to his task, as men stand to whom 
are intrusted the honor and safety of the nation, 
that other men may do their work securely and in 
peace. 

"Freely ye have received, freely give." You 
have yet to learn the art of giving. Be patient 
with yourselves, more patient than you are in 
learning the art of receiving. The art of giving is 
learned by much practice, and through some mis- 
takes. The only fatal mistake lies in not giving 
enough. I have tried to show you how you may 
give wisely of yourselves, where you may dis- 
tribute your personal power. But who can fore- 
cast your work ? Who knows where your lot may 
fall ? Who may presume to anticipate the glori- 
ous details of any man's life, who believes that 
every man's life is a plan of God ? 



VII 

A MAN'S SOUL AND HIS WORLD 

" What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose 
his own soul ? " — Matthew xvi, 26. 

It is among the traditions of the class-room of 
Mark Hopkins, I have been told, that he once put 
the question of our Lord to his class in this way: 
"You would like to have the world, as much of 
it at least as you want. Would you be willing to 
have the world, all of it that you want, and be 
deaf ? Perhaps you would. 

"Would you be willing to have the world, all 
of it that you want, and be deaf and dumb ? 
Perhaps you would. 

"Would you be willing to have the world, all 
of it that you want, and be deaf and dumb and 
blind ? Perhaps you would, but I doubt it : for 
the time comes in such a reckoning when you 
must face the issue of being or having." 

This question of Jesus, if put before men as 
an alternative, can have but one answer. There 
is such a radical difference between being and 
having that few men will deliberately sacrifice 
anything which they feel to be a vital part of 
themselves for things that lie outside themselves. 



98 PERSONAL POWER 

It requires very little reasoning to understand 
that the loss of a sense means a corresponding 
loss of the world, that it takes so much out of the 
value of things for which the exchange is made. 
And as men go deeper in their reasoning they 
can see that the principle acts with increasing 
force the farther it reaches below the range of 
the senses. No one of you believes, on second 
thought, that you could use or enjoy the world 
without a conscience any better than you could 
without sight. You can see that the world is not 
the same object of pleasurable desire with those 
in whom the moral sense has been reduced or 
enfeebled, just as you can see the loss to those 
who suffer from physical disabilities. 

We may assume, I think, that there is substan- 
tial agreement, so far as the principle goes, that 
a man cannot afford the world at the cost of his 
soul. But in any endeavor to apply the principle 
we find ourselves confronted at once with the 
very practical difficulty that as every one of us 
has his soul, so every one of us has his world. 
Naturally and rightly we wish to make the best 
of each. Interpreting the common desire by our 
own desires, we are not to think that the aver- 
age man wishes to throw away his soul any more 
than he wishes to give over one of his senses. 
That is not the way in which men lose their souls. 



A MAN'S SOUL AND HIS WORLD 99 

Neither are we to think that the average man 
ought to throw away the world in so far as it 
is his world. To entertain this opinion seriously 
would carry us back into the narrowest type of 
medievalism. 

What, then, shall we say is the true and proper 
relation of a man's soul to his world ? 

If we had been present when our Lord put the 
question now before us, we should doubtless have 
wished to say to Him, — "Master, must a man 
lose his soul in trying to gain his world ? You 
say, i if a man gain the whole world and lose his 
own soul.' Is that the alternative? Must a man 
lose either his soul or his world ? " 

It seems, I say, as if we should have wished 
to put this direct question to our Lord, had we 
heard the words which fell from his lips. But 
why should any one to-day doubt the answer in 
the light of his after teachings, or in the light 
of his whole personal life? Christianity, as it 
comes to us from Him, does not mean other 
worldliness. It does not mean medievalism, the 
monk's world. Nothing is further from the spirit 
or the word of Christ than any mockery of man 
in his relation to his world. The world element 
in our lives may waken the pity of Christ, it is 
so transient ; it may call out his warnings, it has 
in it such possibilities of evil; but nowhere does 



100 PERSONAL POWER 

He speak of it in contempt, or in scorn, or in 
hate. A man's world may represent that which 
he has rescued from the fleeting years, that which 
he has conquered from the grasp of evil ; or, it may 
represent the honorable accumulations and earn- 
ings of his life, the very increment of his soul, 
his knowledge, his work, his friends, his plans 
and struggles and hopes, against which his soul 
can have no contention, and from which it can 
suffer no loss. 

And there is a sense, truer even than that in 
which we have the world by gain or conquest, in 
which we have it by original endowment, just as 
we have our souls at the hand of God. The prod- 
igal was right when he said, " Father, give me 
the portion of goods which falleth to me." His 
sin consisted in that he gathered all together and 
took his journey into a far country and wasted 
his substance in riotous living. Had he remained 
at home he would have heard for himself the 
word which came to his brother, — " Son, thou 
art ever with me, and all that I have is thine." 
We make the fatal concession when we yield our 
rights of ownership in this world. There was the 
very point of Christ's temptation and of his vic- 
tory. When the tempter came to Him, and 
showed to Him the kingdoms of the world, and 
said to Him, " All these things will I give thee, if 



A MAN'S SOUL AND HIS WORLD 101 

thou wilt fall down and worship me/' he over- 
reached and betrayed himself. The answer of 
Christ was instant. 

" Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and 
him only shalt thou serve." This world is God's 
world. It goes with the worship of Him. It be- 
longs to his worshipers. So Christ met his 
temptation. He saw at once the unreality and 
sham of it. The tempter stood before Him with 
the offer of something which was not his to give. 
It was a piece of bold, naked assumption. Christ 
saw the deception, and met the deceiver with the 
word of rightful authority. The usurper of this 
world found himself in the presence of the true 
heir and master of the world, and in this capacity 
the representative of humanity. That was the 
issue of the final temptation of our Lord. 

But as for us, we are still deceived and be- 
trayed. We acknowledge at once the evil owner- 
ship. We allow the assumption that the world has 
gone out of the hands of God, and therefore out 
of our hands as God's children, and having made 
this fatal allowance we naturally begin to ask at 
what price we can get back the part of it which 
we want. And so concession follows concession. 
The premise once granted, there is no rescue from 
the inexorable logic. Nothing then remains to a 
man who wants the world except the surrender of 



102 PERSONAL POWER 

so much of his manhood as seems necessary to the 
attainment of his object. Here we have the ex- 
planation of the choices of many men. One pro- 
fession, or business, or calling, is chosen rather 
than another, because it is assumed that the less 
christian a man's profession or business or calling 
is, the more of the world there is in it. And this 
choice made, then the method of the profession 
or business or calling follows the same assump- 
tion. It is the next logical step to assume that 
the less christian the method is the more of the 
world will be the result. So the principle of ex- 
change becomes a recognized principle. Christ 
saw it at work in his day. Anybody can see it at 
work still. There are few men, I believe, who go 
into their various pursuits without the latent feel- 
ing that concession or compromise may at some 
time become necessary to success. Some resolve 
that when the issue comes they will sacrifice suc- 
cess. Others go through life without raising any 
clear or sharp moral issue. If they lose morally, 
the losses are gradual and unnoted. All that can 
be said of such men is that their character lacks 
fibre or tone. Here and there a man sees the 
issue, accepts the assumed condition, and delib- 
erately surrenders his manhood. He takes his 
soul into the market place, puts his price upon it, 
and sells it. Hence the constant succession of 



A MAN'S SOUL AND HIS WORLD 103 

tragedies in the life of a great city. Transactions 
of this sort do not appear in the quotations of 
the markets, but exchanges are none the less made 
and put on record. 

Now a right theory of life will not insure right 
conduct. Wrong theories of life are much more 
sure to produce wrong conduct. My contention 
therefore is against the theory that a man can- 
not save his soul and his world. The issue is a 
false one. I protest against it in the name of re- 
ligion. Consider what it means. It means that 
human life is nothing but a dilemma. Turn which 
way a man will, he faces loss. The game is against 
him. Do you believe this to be the moral situ- 
ation ? Does this accord with your conception of 
God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and 
Earth ? Does it seem to you to fit any rational 
idea of a moral government ? Is it a fact ? Does 
God send his children here to face the alterna- 
tive of a lost soul or a lost world ? Does He cast 
them into this dilemma and then withdraw to 
watch the fatal struggle ? Is this a possible con- 
ception of God, of religion, of the moral signifi- 
cance of human life ? The statement of the theory 
refutes it. 

I am not content, however, with any refutation 
of the theory. We need a theory of human life 
which is positive, consistent, and satisfying. Con- 



104 PERSONAL POWER 

sistent, I say, as well as satisfying. We know that 
we do not want to be unsuccessful good men. 
The unsuccessful good man is not the normal 
type. The normal type is the successful good 
man. Modern Christianity is trying to produce 
this type. In other words it is trying to save the 
world, not simply to save the souls of men out of 
the world. Mediaeval Christianity said that this was 
an impossible task, and gave it up. It took men out 
of the world, and shut them up in monasteries in 
protest against the grossness and violence of the 
times. Modern Christianity says that the task is 
not impossible, that it ought to be done, that it 
can be done, that it is being done. In proof of 
its faith it points to the process now going on, 
the organization of the world in the interest of 
righteousness. That is the meaning of good gov- 
ernment, of good law, of good literature, of good 
business. There are failures enough to discourage 
some men, and to make others cynical and scorn- 
ful. It is no easy task. But it is no harder than 
trying to save souls without saving the world. It 
is the peculiar task of the strong man of to-day, 
strong in intelligence as well as in purpose. The 
training of such a man, if it is worth anything, 
ought to give him the advantage of estimating 
values at their actual worth. He ought to be 
able to defend himself against the cheap, smart, 



A MAN'S SOUL AND HIS WORLD 105 

superficial side of the world. He ought to know 
the difference between a professional success 
that has a value which cannot be fully expressed 
in money, and a professional success that has 
no other value than money, or its equivalent in 
something as transient. Every calling has two 
sides, — law, journalism, medicine, the ministry. 
Each and every one of them, and every kind of 
business, has a part which can be organized into 
the righteousness of the world. Each and every 
one of them, and every kind of business, has a 
part which can be used to the loss of soul, with 
no real gain of the world. Suppose a preacher is 
vain, insincere, self-seeking, greedy of place or 
of applause, and uses his ministry to these lower 
ends. Can he not hear the diviner voice, the voice 
of the world, even, which is saying to him in 
moments of reality, " Come up higher ; leave the 
low plane of your foolish ambitions and take to 
the heights of your calling " ? Suppose the call- 
ing is law, or journalism, or the public service, 
and one puts it to second uses and gets the re- 
wards of second uses, does not his trained nature 
revolt at the use and at the reward? If it does 
not, then his training has only made him a mere 
expert worldling. It simply enables him to grovel 
a little more successfully than the untrained man 
at his side. Or suppose one deals at first hand in 



106 PERSONAL POWER 

money. Money is his business. Does he not 
know that money has two sides, one clean, spot- 
less, bright ; the other dirty, foul, and black ? Is 
it any satisfaction to him that one dollar will buy 
as much of some things as the other, when he 
knows that it will not buy honor, respect, or 
gratitude from one human heart ? 

Yes, modern Christianity is making some things 
plain. It is showing that there are two ways of 
doing the same outward thing, and in so far as it 
can make the difference clear, it is redeeming the 
world by challenging all newcomers to take the 
better way. I cannot be mistaken in assuming that 
each new generation does something to make the 
world more worthy of the ambitions of men. If 
not, if we are bringing up men without moral 
vision, who have no power to strive by the better 
method, who must succumb after a little, and 
swell the volume of the thoughtless, indifferent, 
self-seeking throng, then we need to revise our 
training quite as much on the intellectual as on 
the moral side. The Scriptures use good, honest, 
searching language about men who do not know 
enough not to be deceived and snared and caught 
in the mere temptations of worldliness. They tell 
a man in one way or another that he is a fool ; 
or, as in the calmer speech of our Lord, they put 
him to a reckoning of the profit that may be ex- 



A MAN'S SOUL AND HIS WORLD 107 

pected to come from that world which has been 
bought at the loss of soul. To every man who 
is taking hold upon life in the spirit of mere cal- 
culation, who is trifling with this principle of ex- 
change, the words of our Lord come with as vivid 
and startling force as when they were uttered. 
What is your profit ? What have you when you 
have your world, and miss your soul? 

Let us go back for a moment into the calcula- 
tion. You are thinking perhaps of the analogy 
with which I began my sermon, between the loss 
of physical power and the loss of moral power. 
And you may be ready to say — But we do take 
physical risks; we do make physical losses to se- 
cure outward ends. Why should we not take moral 
risks on occasion, if need be, allow some moral 
concessions and sacrifices? I answer the question 
by asking you to compare the relative effect of 
each loss in a man's own thought and conscious- 
ness. One may give up physical strength, he may 
surrender years of his life, and glory in the sac- 
rifice. So men go out from us year by year to 
battle with the darkness and cold of the North, 
leaving behind them, if they return, they know 
not how many years of their lives. So men went 
out from us a generation ago, to return from 
distant battlefields maimed and wounded, living 
still among us in unaffected pride and honor, 



108 PERSONAL POWER 

as they recall the sacrifice. Do you know the 
man, or if you know him would you take his 
place, who is wont to point with like pride to the 
moral losses which stand for his world ? Do you 
know a man of fortune, if that fortune has been 
gained by fraud, who delights to call up the men 
whom he has cheated, and exhibit them as his 
victims ? Do you know a man who has risen to 
any heights of statesmanship, if his early career 
had been marked by corruption, who delights to 
uncover his early practices and glory in them ? 
Do you know a man, save the veriest profligate, 
who delights to hold up the hearts which he has 
betrayed and shamed ? Such men do exist. Would 
you take the place of any one of them? 

And yet we are in constant danger of forget- 
ting that it is the soul in us which makes the 
world desirable. When that is reduced, the world 
is reduced ; when that is gone, the world is gone. 
The parable of our Lord spoken to this point has 
its constant illustration before our eyes. Some one 
who has been putting this principle of exchange 
into practice reaches the time when he can pull 
down his barns and build greater, and then begin 
to say to his soul : " Soul, take thine ease, eat, 
drink, and be merry." But the soul answers him 
not a word. It is dumb and dead. And the man 
goes about among his possessions, solitary and 



A MAN'S SOUL AND HIS WORLD 109 

empty. The world looks on in pity or contempt, 
and says that he has overdone the matter. At 
what point in the process of this exchange of 
his soul for the world did he begin to overdo 
the matter ? 

And not only are we in danger of forgetting 
that it is the soul in us which makes the world 
desirable, we are more apt to forget that it is 
the soul in the world which makes it desirable. 
Take that out, and the world loses its value in 
our eyes for the lowest purposes. To use the 
extremest form of statement, it is the virtue 
there is in the world which makes vice attrac- 
tive. Take the virtue out of a city, let vice walk 
the streets shamelessly and unrebuked, and every 
profligate, at least of wealth, would leave the 
city for another in which there was virtue enough 
to make vice a temptation. Take law out of a 
city, and every cheat and defrauder would leave 
that city for another where there was law enough 
to make it an object to practice his fraud. No, 
the world which men sometimes think they want, 
a world without a conscience, is an impossible 
world. It does not exist. If it did exist, they 
would not want it. The plain truth is, that turn 
the question of our Lord as we will, reduce it 
to whatever conditions we can imagine, apply 
it to any possible situation in our lives, it has 



110 PERSONAL POWER 

but one answer. The world, without the soul 
there is in it, or the world gained through the 
loss of soul, is not valuable, it is not desirable. 
And the advantage of an education, if it have 
any moral advantage, consists in this, that it en- 
ables its possessor to find out and anticipate by 
his intelligence what others may be obliged to 
learn by experience. 

But the question resting upon this alternative 
is not now before us. If it is, it is because we 
raise the issue. The alternative, the dilemma, 
if it exists, is our own, not of God. The " if " 
with which Christ opens his question is not of 
his invention, but forced upon his attention by 
the practices of men. The true question, perplex- 
ing it may be in some of its details, but noble 
and inspiring in its broad utterance, is that which 
we have been considering — What is the true 
and proper relation of a man's soul to his world ? 
It grows nobler and more inspiring, as it falls 
upon the ears of each succeeding generation. 
For it is becoming more manifestly clear that it 
is the business of every man according to his 
conscience to save his soul, and according to his 
intelligence to save his world. There is no con- 
tradiction, provided every man learns how to save 
his world with and for his soul. The soul is here 
for a purpose, — here rather than somewhere 



A MAN'S SOUL AND HIS WORLD 111 

else, — and that purpose is not simply to save 
itself from the world, but to save itself and its 
world. Even the question of personal salvation 
is not what we are saved from, but also what we 
take up with us in the process of our salvation. 
You send your ship to sail the sea. It comes 
back to you almost a wreck, the cargo lost, and 
with only enough of the crew left to bring the 
dismantled hulk into port. That may be a grand 
sight. It may tell its own story of suffering and 
peril and heroism. A whole city may turn out 
before it in welcome. But that was not the ob- 
ject for which you sent your ship to sail the sea. 
You waited its return, freighted with the riches 
for which you built the ship and picked your 
crew to man it. God sends a soul into this world, 
and it comes back to Him almost a loss, alone, 
and empty-handed. That may be a grand sight. 
It may tell its own story of temptation and strug- 
gle and victory, a scarred soul, but saved. All 
heaven may turn out to give it welcome. But 
that was not the end for which God sent that 
soul into the world. He waited its return, rich 
with the earnings of the years of time. Heaven, 
it is a common saying, is reserved for those who 
fail here. Men may so fail here that there are 
no places in heaven too high for them. But men 
may so succeed here as to enrich heaven. I 



112 PERSONAL POWER 

read in the vision of the Holy City : " They 
shall bring the glory and the honor of the na- 
tions into it." That is the honorable, the legiti- 
mate, the actual contribution of this world to 
heaven. 

Who can compute the earnings of great souls? 
Who can estimate their holdings in this wealth 
of the nations? There is no way except to trace 
effects which we most value back to their causes, 
back to the men who produced them. These are 
the men who in their time left their stamp upon 
their fellow men and upon events, who widened 
the paths of justice and of mercy, who led the 
way to the heights of statesmanship, who car- 
ried the light of learning and of religion into 
dark lands, who consecrated wealth by their 
methods of bestowing it; men who knew their 
honest rights in the world, and dared to main- 
tain them; who forced their way across disputed 
territory, and held the ground for us to occupy 
till we too were ready to advance. A college 
ought to stand for this forward movement in the 
world. There is a world not only of living men, 
but of living forces. The world means organized 
power. Men call it the power of church, or state, 
the power of party, the power of the press, the 
power of capital, the power of education; they 
give it a hundred names, and they are all real. 



A MAN'S SOUL AND HIS WORLD 113 

They stand for facts. And these forces represent 
our world. We cannot ignore them. If we want 
to save men, to help them in body and soul, if 
we want to take part in the social endeavor and 
ministry of our time, the hope of doing any really 
great good lies in the forces which we possess. 
The man who is afraid of this intervening world, 
or misunderstands it, or underestimates its moral 
value, will certainly lose it. And he who loses 
his world, will lose the thing of greatest value 
to him and to other men, next to his soul. 



vm 

THE CAPACITY FOE THE TRUE 

" Which thing is true in him and in yon." — 1 John ii, 8. ] 

Just what thing the Apostle had in mind when 
he wrote this is not very plain ; and we are not 
curious to stop to ask, for we are at once caught 
by the saying that anything, no matter now what 
it may be, which is true in God may be true also 
in us. Here is a passage which, by the turn of a 
sentence, flashes its light into our common nature, 
showing us at a glance the reality of the resem- 
blance between God and men. Their natures cor- 
respond, and so close is the correspondence, that 
the very things which have their seat and home 
in the life of God may have their seat and home 
in the life of men. 

" So near is grandeur to our dust, 
So near is God to man, 
When Duty whispers low ' Thou must,' 
The Youth replies, « I can.' " 

I want to take this truth, of which we have the 
passing hint in the words of the Apostle, and try 
to uncover it before you in something of its 
breadth and depth. It is the truth that a man is 
not a fragment, not something separate and iso- 



THE CAPACITY FOR THE TRUE 115 

lated unless it be by the compulsion of his own 
wrongdoing, but rather a part of the whole, with 
rights in every related part, capable of fellowship 
with the best as of sympathy with the lowest, 
able to find access alike to nature and to human- 
ity. And the ground of this capacity is the one 
fact that the medium of exchange which is cur- 
rent throughout the universe is the true, or as we 
say more formally, the truth. He can use this 
medium. The things which are true in God, are 
true in him, and if in him, then everywhere. 
Therefore he can reach God, and God can reach 
him. Therefore he can understand nature, because 
nature is made to be understood that way. There- 
fore he can communicate with his own kind, and 
according to the amount of truth there is in him 
secure lasting results. 

I wish that I could make the positive state- 
ment of this thought as strong as the negative 
statement of it. The negative statement is — the 
isolation of the untrue. The untrue man is out 
of reach of God, except for forgiveness or pun- 
ishment. The untrue man, even though his un- 
truth be a matter of neglect or inaccuracy, gets 
no sure or far access into nature. The untrue man 
gradually severs his connection with his own kind. 
Nobody believes him. His words are idle words. 
They are without profit. He does not influence, 



116 PERSONAL POWER 

organize, or command. Every effort which he 
makes through the use of the untrue, in method 
or in aim, rebounds, and throws him back from 
men. At last he loses the one vantage ground of 
all effort, and gives up the struggle, — a self-de- 
feated, separated, isolated man. Keep then, I ask 
you, as the background of what I may say, the 
negative form of my subject, — the isolation of 
the untrue, the untrue man. And then come out 
into the positive and quickening statement of it, 
namely, that it is through our capacity for the 
true that we have contact, influence, power as 
touching men, oneness with all related life, access 
to nature, communion with God. 

How can we develop the capacity for the true ? 
how can we use it for the common good? Or 
keeping the negative form still in mind, how can 
we make sure that we escape the isolation of the 
untrue ? 

The question answers itself. It runs to its con- 
clusion with the simplicity and the certainty of a 
formula. 

First, be true. 

Second, get possessions in things which are true. 

Third, make the things which are true in you 
and to you true to other men. 

Let us not pass by the beginning of our answer 
because it is so obvious. This capacity for the 



THE CAPACITY FOR THE TRUE 117 

true on the personal side, you say to me, is sim- 
ply the capacity for character. Yes. But how 
much do you allow this to mean ? The capacity 
for character is something more than the necessity 
for character. When Aristotle gave his pupils 
the secret of oratory — " Your power over your 
hearers will depend upon what your hearers think 
of you," — he was emphasizing the necessity for 
character. Character in his view was essential 
to the success, at least to the full and lasting 
success of any man who would try to reach his 
fellows through speech. " Honesty is the best 
policy," — there you come into the distinctly 
commercial aspect of character. I am not speak- 
ing of character on this plane. I am speaking of 
the capacity, not the necessity for character. And 
I am reminding you that the capacity for the true 
is the capacity for character. Turn the saying 
about and let it face the other way. Think of the 
capacity for character as being the capacity for 
the true. Who does not want that capacity in- 
creased to its natural limit ? Suppose one could 
have, for the asking, a reason which would always 
work true, and never slip into sophistry or deceit, 
or an imagination which would always work true, 
and never trifle or play one false, or a will which 
would always enforce promptly and courageously 
all better desires, or a conscience which would 



118 PERSONAL POWER 

utter its unfailing yea, yea, or nay, nay, would 
not one think it worth his while to take the gift? 
But if all these things are to be had for the earn- 
ing are they any the less desirable ? What is edu- 
cation but the earning process, the development 
of the capacity for the true into the power to be 
true? What is the meaning of an arrested educa- 
tion, if the arrest be voluntary, except satisfaction 
with partial and uncertain results, the willingness 
to take one's chance as to the powers within him, 
whether they will work true or not ? The scholar 
is not the man who has the mere hunger and 
thirst for knowledge ; that may become an abnor- 
mal appetite. The scholar is the man who has 
begun to feel the passion for the true, first the 
true in the action of his own powers, then the 
true in the things he seeks. At first sensitive to 
errors in the working of his mind, he becomes 
sensitive to errors in the working of any part of 
his nature. Otherwise we have a glaring incon- 
sistency. We have the immoral scholar. We have 
the man who exacts truth to the last degree from 
some powers of his nature, and allows other 
powers to make sport of him at their will. Then 
we have the tragedy of literature, of science, of 
art, — the intellect at work in utter disregard of 
the nature of which it is a part, separating itself 
more and more from the man, till at last the man 



THE CAPACITY FOR THE TRUE 119 

whose mental power commands us, crouches be- 
fore us in the appeal of his moral nature to our 
charity or pity. This inconsistency may exist. It 
does exist. We are all conscious of it. If it be 
a painful consciousness, it may give us hope. It 
shows us that we have begun to feel at some 
point our capacity for the true. The untrue re- 
mains under increasing protest. If we can only 
keep up the struggle we shall win one sure result. 
Capacity will become character. 

But our answer widens as it advances. The 
capacity for the true means more in the last result 
than character. It means also the ability to pos- 
sess the things which are true. It means the true 
man plus something in sure possession which is 
true. It is not till he has made this gain that 
he passes from influence to power. Character 
gives influence, but, as Carlyle puts it, "it is 
the knowing ones who rule." But what is the 
knowledge which gives power? Is it anything 
else than the possession of the thing which is 
true, provided one knows its worth and how to 
use it ? And the advance in knowledge, is it any- 
thing else than the gradual approximation to the 
truth ? 

" That virtue of originality," Kuskin says in 
his fine impatience, " which men so strain after is 
not newness, as they vainly think, it is only genu- 



120 PERSONAL POWER 

ineness. It all depends on the glorious faculty 
of getting to the spring of things and working 
out from that. It is the coolness and clearness 
and deliciousness of the water fresh from the 
fountain head opposed to the thick, hot, unref resh- 
ing drainage from other men's meadows." 

The newer thought is nothing unless it be the 
true thought. It is never the new which super- 
sedes the old, it is the true which supersedes the 
old. If some men could only believe this, how 
quickly and surely would it deliver them from 
their fear of progress. 

The new scientific theory which comes to abide, 
causing it may be much adjustment, is simply the 
theory which starts from a source nearer the heart 
of nature, and therefore having more force and 
reach. The new political or social principle, which 
is really able to reconstruct or to supplant, is 
simply the principle which is charged more thor- 
oughly with the truth, with justice, that is, and 
freedom and righteousness. And the new inter- 
pretation of religion, from which men have the 
most to hope or to fear, according to their view 
of it, is the interpretation which comes from some 
vision of God. 

The permanent value of thenew truth of any 
sort can usually be measured by the certainty of 
knowledge of the man who holds it. When Paul 



THE CAPACITY FOR THE TRUE 121 

said of Christianity, " I know whom I have be- 
lieved, and am persuaded that he is able to keep 
that which I have committed unto him against 
that day/' we at least can see that the movement 
of Christianity into the world had begun. A truth 
seldom begins to move until some man is able 
to stand behind it and say of it "I know/' some 
Paul, some Galileo, some Luther. This depend- 
ence of truth upon men would be pathetic, were 
it not that God has set a great patience in the 
heart of nature and in the heart of humanity, 
even as He holds it in his own heart. But know- 
ledge, to come back again to our exact thought, 
knowledge is simply the personal possession of the 
true. To ask therefore how much a man knows 
is to ask how much is true to him. Singularly 
enough we have been obliged to change the word 
to make sure of the fact. When we really wish 
to test a man's knowledge of a given thing, we 
are not so apt to say, Do you know it ? as Do you 
believe it ? We want a word which expresses sin- 
cerity, devotion, if need be sacrifice, some actual 
or possible commitment of the life to the fortune 
of the thing which is true. That is the test which 
the world applies to every " knowing " man. It 
is a perfectly fair test. And it can begin to be 
applied the moment one passes from study as an 
intellectual discipline to study as a means of know- 



122 PERSONAL POWER 

ledge. One can play chess without inviting ques- 
tions which lie outside the skill of the game. But 
the moment one begins to investigate subjects of 

human concern the whole attitude of men toward 
i 

him changes. The questions they ask reach back 
to motive and on to result. The tests all turn 
that way. Do you know this thing in principle, 
in fact, in some kind of reality? Do you know it 
to the point of believing in it? Can you trust it? 
Can you guarantee it by some sort of personal 
endorsement ? Are you willing to stand by it and 
take the consequences? 

Take up the superior callings, they all meet 
you with this one unswerving test. Law, for 
example, is in appearance the rule of precedent. 
Do you therefore expect to satisfy the law by 
memorizing it ? Memory is of unusual value to 
the lawyer ; but, as one of the greatest lawyers 
among our graduates once said to me, it is the 
first business of a lawyer to learn to forget. The 
mind cannot be so burdened with cases that it 
cannot revert at once and naturally to principles. 
The quick and sure return of the mind to prin- 
ciples, to the things known to be true, is the 
working test of the man who professes to know, 
be his knowledge the facts of science, or the prin- 
ciples of jurisprudence, or the truths of spiritual 
religion. In a recent conversation with a friend 



THE CAPACITY FOR THE TRUE 123 

in business, he remarked, that the places in the 
business world which are constantly in waiting 
for young men are those which demand the right 
handling of truth, truth in the form of facts. 
The man who can stand before a board of direc- 
tors without confusion or without flinching in 
the assertion or proof of a fact is the man of an 
assured future. "I sometimes think," he said, 
" that one ought to have a training for business 
like the training for the pulpit." 

It is here, as I have said, that there comes 
the first real consciousness of power. When one 
awakens to the certainty of his knowledge, if it 
be of things of recognized value, he begins to feel 
that men cannot afford to pass him by. He too 
has a place in the world. I think that I can un- 
derstand, as I certainly honor, the sense of power 
in the man who feels the worth of money which 
he has earned, as that money begins to take the 
name and advantage of capital. Knowing that the 
ability to earn it may mean the ability to use it, 
he has the right to the consciousness of power. 
Can I make less account of the mental earnings of 
men as these begin to take the name and assume 
the responsibilities of knowledge ? When a man 
becomes an authority does not he too become a 
capitalist? Let us understand that as the capacity 
for the true finds its first and just expression in 



124 PERSONAL POWER 

character, so does it find its second and equally 
just result in the possession of things which are 
true, a possession which is knowledge, a knowledge 
which may be power. 

But our subject widens still as it advances. 
This capacity for the true lays upon its possessor 
the obligation to make the things which are true 
in him and to him true to other men. The ground 
of this obligation lies in the fact that the capacity 
for the true is universal. The capacity of the in- 
dividual, however great it may be, is only a part 
of the capacity of the race. And he who does not 
recognize this capacity in others cannot estimate 
it properly in himself. To refuse, therefore, or to 
fail to satisfy this obligation is to stop short of 
leadership or of service, — you may take as you 
will the word of ambition or the word of duty. 
If a man stops with character he stops with influ- 
ence. If he stops with knowledge he stops with 
the consciousness of power. Not until he believes 
in the capacity of all men for the true, and acts 
upon that faith, does he rise to the plane where 
he belongs, the plane of leadership or of service. 
This of course means action, the going out of self 
into men's lives. I do not pause now to dwell upon 
the motive of this outgoing force. I insist upon 
it as a part of the development in us of the capac- 
ity for the true. It has its own philosophy. I will 



THE CAPACITY FOR THE TRUE 125 

give you a paragraph which brings out with ut- 
most clearness this philosophy of action. I quote 
from Canon Mozley in his treatise on the " Ruling 
Ideas in Early Ages " : " The peculiar and su- 
perior force of an act, as compared with general 
character, is gained upon a principle which is per- 
fectly intelligible. A great act gathers up and 
brings to a focus the whole habit and character 
of the man. The act is dramatic, while the man's 
habit or character is didactic only : and what is 
more, there is a limitation in character which there 
is not in an act. There is a boundlessness in an 
act. It is not a divided, balanced thing, but it is 
like an immense spring or leap. The whole of the 
man is in it, and at one great stroke it is revealed. 
A great act has thus a place in time : it is like a 
great poem, a great law, a great battle, any great 
event ; it is a movement ; it is a type which fructi- 
fies and reproduces itself.' ' 

There are two great motives which compel men 
to act, when you rise above those motives which 
belong to the struggle for existence. The first is 
the compulsion of an idea or of a love, the motive 
of the scientist or the christian. The second is faith 
in men, such a conception of humanity that one 
cannot resist the impulse to enter its life. It is this 
motive which is now before us. We are to make 
the things which are true in us and to us true to 



126 PERSONAL POWER 

others, because they have the like capacity with 
us for the true. This capacity is their argument, 
their appeal. I know how faithless and unbeliev- 
ing we may become about the capacity of men for 
the true. I know too how quickly we may be shaken 
out of our faithlessness and unbelief. The mind 
of the world seems at times to grow drowsy and 
numb, but a word may be spoken which will make 
men think the world over. The heart or conscience 
of the world seems at times to become weak and 
cowardly, but a deed may be done which takes 
away fear, and makes men brave again the world 
over. You do not know when you open your 
morning paper that you may not read some para- 
graph, the report of one man's act, which will 
change the current of your thought for the day. 
It may be of such a kind as to change the thought 
of the civilized world. Wherever the story goes 
there may go with it the power to affect the 
thought, the speech, the very accent and tones of 
men. 

Doubtless every one of us has his principles of 
exclusion. Something in humanity, near at hand 
or afar off, lies below recognition. Darwin drew 
the line at the lowest tribe among the South 
American Indians. " Mr. Darwin," said Admiral 
Sir James Sullivan, "had often expressed to me 
his conviction that it was utterly useless to send 



THE CAPACITY FOR THE TRUE 127 

missionaries to such a set of savages as the Fue- 
gians, probably the very lowest of the human race. 
I had always replied that I did not believe any 
human being existed too low to comprehend the 
simple message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 
After some years Mr. Darwin wrote to me that the 
account of the mission showed that he had been 
wrong and I right, and he requested me to forward 
to the society an enclosed cheque for five pounds 
as a testimony of his interest in their good work." 
The capacity for the true in human nature, — 
where will you draw the line at any virtue, or at 
any people? There is but one place where one 
may draw the line with certainty, and that is 
within himself. It is possible, I must again re- 
mind you, for one to so sin against his own na- 
ture, as to restrict, if not destroy, the capacity for 
the true. It is possible for a man to condemn 
himself — no one else can do it — to the isolation 
of the untrue. But outside that realm in which the 
individual is sovereign, I know of no restricted 
territory. Wherever I look in the universe of 
God I find written on every part — "He is a 
faithful Creator." Everywhere I see the signs of 
the true. The stars go right above us, and all 
things leading up to man tread their sure, unerr- 
ing path. As I look above, or beneath, I dare not 
falter in my faith concerning man. He, too, must 



128 PERSONAL POWER 

have the capacity for the true. The saying must 
be right : the prophecy must be sure. " Which 
thing is true in him and in you." 

Can there be any stronger challenge to our 
moral nature than that which comes to us so un- 
expectedly out of this ancient word — that we be 
true, that we get possession in things which are 
true, that we make the things which are true in 
us and to us true to others ? It is one note in the 
ceaseless challenge to character, to knowledge, to 
faith. The challenge to character is as old as that 
first sense of sin which began the struggle for 
righteousness. The challenge to knowledge is 
as old as civilization and grows more urgent as 
" knowledge grows." The challenge to faith, faith 
in men as well as faith in God, is as old at least 
as Christianity. It is hard for the world to accept 
this challenge in its completeness. Men hesitate 
most before the call to faith. But in our strivings 
for character and for knowledge we do not satisfy 
the challenge. We cannot really hope to become 
true, we cannot really hope to possess ourselves 
of the things which are true, until we are willing 
and able to make the things which are true in us 
and to us, true to every man of equal rights in 
the truth* 



IX 

THE MORALLY WELL-BRED MAN 

"He hath shewed thee, man, what is good; and what doth the 
Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk 
humbly with thy God ? " — Micah vi, 8. 

A traveler of unusual discernment, who had 
had frequent opportunity to observe the bearing 
and habits of men in position, met recently the 
heir of one of our American men of fortune. 
" The young man," he remarked to a friend, " did 
not seem to me to be oppressed with the sense of 
his importance, but rather to be somewhat over- 
weighted with the sense of his responsibility. He 
wore the expression, which one sometimes sees on 
the face of a prince, who does not seem to be quite 
sure of what the future has in store for him." 

This single and almost chance observation 
would have no general value, did it not accord with 
the impression which many have, who know best 
the temper of the more serious-minded young men 
of the country. A change has been going on 
within the past generation, more evidently within 
the past decade, in the spirit in which young men 
of inheritance or of acquirement anticipate their 
future. The light-hearted, eager, confident ambi- 



130 PERSONAL POWER 

tion of earlier times has given place to a more 
careful, if not to a more anxious outlook. The 
volume of ambition has not lessened. There has 
been no decline in courage. But there is uncer- 
tainty where before there was assurance. The 
young man of to-day as he draws near to his 
responsibilities is not as sure as was his prede- 
cessor, of what he can do, nor in fact of what he 
ought to do. 

There are certain reasons for this change in the 
habit of mind of our generation. In the first 
place, there are more young men who have much 
at stake than formerly. The number has greatly 
increased of those who have power of some kind 
in hand, some the power of fortune, some of edu- 
cation, some of position. Every one of these dif- 
fers from the boy who starts from nothing and 
therefore has everything to gain and nothing to 
lose. The possession of power, whether it comes 
by inheritance, or, as is the case with the majority 
of college men, is earned by industry and sacri- 
fice, develops caution rather than rashness or over- 
confidence. In the second place, the approach to 
one's future is not so clearly defined as formerly, 
certainly not the moral approach. No profession 
has the same definite moral significance which it 
had even a generation ago. There are more kinds 
of ministers and lawyers and doctors and teach- 



THE MORALLY WELL-BRED MAN 131 

ers than there were then. And there are new 
callings upon which we have not been able as yet 
to put a distinct moral valuation. One may reach 
almost any common end by different paths. Once 
it was law which led into politics or public life ; 
now it is equally journalism, or successful busi- 
ness. In the third place the sense of the com- 
plexity of life is at first confusing. One does not 
easily become used to the vast and swift machin- 
ery of which he sees and feels the movement. 
There seems to be no chance for personal initia- 
tive or personal freedom. One is always conscious, 
I think, of a certain personal loss as he first 
enters the " world." He becomes at once a part 
of something. He is no longer his own individual 
self in its wholeness. And in the fourth place 
there is the overwhelming impression to-day of 
material power. What is a man, one man, in the 
presence of the vast combinations of wealth ! 
The present impression of the power of money 
is, I believe, greater (to some minds very much 
greater) than the fact warrants. It is still the 
capable man who is in control of affairs, not cap- 
ital, and he is quite as likely to have had no 
capital at the beginning except his brains, as to 
have been born a capitalist. But the first impres- 
sion of material power is bewildering. The ma- 
terial seems to be in the ascendant everywhere. 



132 PERSONAL POWER 

It is not simply the spiritual, it is the human, 
which appears to be in subjection. 

These and like causes create the state of mind 
to which I have referred. They introduce the ele- 
ment of uncertainty into all personal ambitions. 
They make it hard for a man to look clearly, 
steadily, and confidently into his future. And yet 
clearness, steadiness, and a good degree of confi- 
dence are the very results which education aims 
to secure. These are the characteristics of the 
well-bred man, on the intellectual and moral side. 
How shall we produce the well-bred man of this 
order, the man made ready for responsibilities, in 
so far as education can accomplish the result ? I 
emphasize, in what I say to you, the part which 
moral agencies take in the necessary training of 
such men to-day. I do not know that precisely 
the same moral agencies would have been required, 
or would have sufficed, in other times. I discuss 
our own necessities and the directive moral forces 
at our command. The striking peculiarity of our 
times lies in the fact that the needful moral quali- 
ties and forces are entirely in evidence. "He 
hath shewed thee, man, what is good; and what 
doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, 
and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with 
thy God?" 

The morally well-bred man of to-day, the man 



THE MORALLY WELL-BRED MAN 133 

capable of responsibility, must be just. The ap- 
parent contention of the people is against ine- 
quality. I believe that this contention has no 
meaning, and therefore no force, except as in 
general terms, or in particular cases, it strikes at 
injustice. Men do not want the equality which 
makes them alike even in condition. I doubt if 
they care to be equally rich. It is evident that 
they do not care to be equally intelligent. What 
human nature cannot endure, at least human na- 
ture trained in the ways of modern democracy, is 
that one man should be rich at the price of an- 
other man's poverty, or that one man should be 
intelligent at the price of another man's ignorance. 
The thing which every one is sensitive about is 
injustice. The man whom everybody hates is first 
the unjust man, and then the man who, without 
being personally unjust, is willing to thrive upon 
any organized injustice. And so we get by indi- 
rection the thing which all want most, namely, 
justice ; and also the man whom society values 
most, first the just man, and still more the man 
who is able to insure justice. 

The requirement of my text is that a man shall 
" do justly." That accords with the popular 
demand. Public morality usually comes about 
through the infusion of more will into private 
morality. Public morality consists simply in 



134 PERSONAL POWER 

" doing " with the requisite courage and force on 
a large scale, what a great many men are doing 
in personal ways, and for personal results. No 
one can expect to succeed in anything which con- 
cerns many persons except as he brings into play 
a well-trained will. The dominant man every- 
where is the persistent and determined man. In- 
dustrialism offers the special field for the devel- 
opment of this type of power. The captains of 
industry belong, without exception, so far as I 
know, to this class. It is surprising how quickly 
material forces fall into place under the mastery 
of the patient, but bold and constructive, mind. 
It is surprising how obstinate the forces are which 
confront the same type of mind in the field of 
moral action. The kind of will power which se- 
cures the present triumphs of industrialism is not 
necessarily of the first order. It by no means 
follows that the great organizers and promoters 
would succeed if they faced moral, in place of 
material, conditions. The men who in succession 
rule Wall Street might, and probably would, fail 
to reform New York. Indeed, when you leave out 
the most exacting moral requirements, or make 
them subordinate in the solution of any problem, 
you greatly simplify the problem. When you be- 
gin to ask questions about the successful man, 
you do not ask the hard questions, those which 



THE MORALLY WELL-BRED MAN 135 

are really trying and determinative, until you 
reach the moral issues involved, of which the 
most fundamental is justice. You ask if such a 
man is energetic, inventive, courageous ? Yes. Is 
he faithful, exact, truthful? Yes. Is he honest, 
according to the standard of commercial honesty? 
Yes. Is he just ? Does he consider the rights and 
interests of all who are legitimately concerned in 
his operations ? Well, that is a new question. It 
is not understood that this is exactly a part of his 
business. I think that there are men who make 
justice in the broadest sense a part of their busi- 
ness. I think, however, that the common estimate 
of the successful man makes little account of this 
quality. And yet if you eliminate this quality, do 
you not see how much easier success may be ? Do 
you not see that success acquired without the re- 
strictions imposed by justice represents an infe- 
rior, because a less difficult, order of greatness? 
Do you not see that so long as it fails to meet 
those moral obligations which each advance neces- 
sitates, power must be classed as rude and ele- 
mentary ? There is no real gain in the transfer of 
power from the arts of war to the arts of peace 
unless the transfer carries with it a distinct moral 
gain. It is always the moral element, and usually 
it is justice, which has the last word to say, about 
a man, or an institution, or a nation. 



136 PERSONAL POWER 

And you can but notice that it is the asser- 
tion of this quality which brings men of posi- 
tion most quickly and effectively into the public 
confidence. Some of the men of to-day who are 
in most confidential and trustworthy relations 
with the people at large are the governors of the 
states. They stand in the public thought, not 
simply because of their office, but because of the 
many noble illustrations of its use; for justice, 
that quality which I am insisting upon, reaches 
so much farther, and means so much more than 
commercial honesty. There ought to be no reason 
why the higher interests of corporations should 
not coincide with the higher interests of the state. 
In the long run, I believe that it is a good busi- 
ness policy to work toward the people rather than 
away from them. And to this end I urge that 
the most profitable man, whoever he may be, or 
wherever he may be, is the just man. The man 
who fails to earn this reputation is not profitable, 
except for some immediate and secondary uses. 

But the man well bred morally, capable, that 
is, of responsibility, under present demands, must 
have sympathy. My text says that he must "love 
mercy." I put sympathy in place of mercy because 
it is becoming so easy to satisfy the current sense 
of mercy. Without doubt our age will pass into 
history as the most merciful of all the ages. We 



THE MORALLY WELL-BRED MAN 137 

have taken severity out of our theories of life, 
and for the most part out of our practices. We 
have measured progress in religion, in law, in 
education, and in social development very largely 
by the growth of humane principles and methods. 
And we have carried the idea of mercy far out 
into the region of charity. We have studied the 
art of charity in its noblest forms. Almsgiving 
has yielded slowly but surely to methods of pre- 
vention and social betterment. This change in 
public sentiment has cost something, but the cost 
has fallen upon the generation which is now pass- 
ing away. Mercy as an intellectual conception is 
an easy inheritance. No child of to-day struggles 
through the bitter experience of many children of 
earlier times in the thought of God. And mercy 
as an applied force has passed into the routine of 
organization. I have had occasion to say elsewhere 
that charity has become almost the pastime of the 
church. 

What is the stronger term in which we need to 
express our action to make it match that of our 
immediate predecessors? I have said that it is 
sympathy. Sympathy is the word of democracy. 
Kings, yes despots, may be merciful, but sympa- 
thy in its social and political meaning is out of 
their reach. Sympathy is the fellow feeling which 
actuates men who have a common opportunity, as 



138 PERSONAL POWER 

well as a common need. Sympathy is the claim 
upon you of the man who is trying to help him- 
self, much more than of the man who wants your 
help. Sympathy does not ask for your money, but 
for you. It asks you to put away your prejudices, 
to withhold your patronage, to make room for 
those who have earned their place at your side. 
Sympathy asks you to interpret your fellow men, 
to translate, it may be, their unspoken, or wrongly 
spoken thoughts, into appropriate speech, to make 
the word of violence the word of reason, to in- 
corporate their aspirations and struggles and sac- 
rifices into the social order. 

No educated man is worthy of a place in a demo- 
cracy who does not "love mercy" in this high 
sense. The first business of education on its human 
side is to enable — I think that I would better 
say to compel — one to recognize and honor the 
self-respecting man beside him. I go further. It 
is our business as educated persons to think of 
men in large terms. The Puritan had his way of 
idealizing the individual, which worked grandly 
in its time. He put the man with the right cause 
against the world. " One with God was a major- 
ity." Phillips Brooks made his one man a part of 
a redeemed and glorified humanity. He resolved 
men into man and then poured out upon his ideal 
man the wealth of his heart in passionate love. 



THE MORALLY WELL-BRED MAN 139 

Take your own way of idealizing men. The ways 
are various, so various that they are almost con- 
tradictory. But do not fail to accomplish your- 
selves in the art. Beware of the revenge of hu- 
manity upon the man who thinks meanly of it. 
The penalty is pharisaism. The pharisee is the 
outcast of history. By all the traditions and 
standards of Christianity he is the type of the 
ill-bred man, the man who disowns and dishonors 
his kind. 

The formula of my text for the training of the 
morally well-bred man, the man capable of meet- 
ing his responsibilities, reaches its conclusion in 
a virtue which in one form or another, or under 
one name or another, we greatly admire in others 
if we do not always covet it. The religious ex- 
pression of it is humility, the humility of faith, or 
as my text has it, the walking humbly with God. 
In common speech we call it unconsciousness, the 
unconsciousness of one who loses himself in his 
deed; or we call it reverence, the attitude of one 
who bows before the power that is above him ; or 
we call it faith, the habit of mind of one who 
allies himself with God through obedience and 
trust. We can measure the worth of this quality 
by its absence. We want the sufficient man ; we 
do not want the self -sufficient man. We look with 
feelings varying from disappointment to disgust 



140 PERSONAL POWER 

upon all exhibitions of self-consciousness, vanity, 
conceit, and self-assertion. A man can almost 
undo a great deed by his personal bearing in re- 
gard to it. There have been brave soldiers who 
were vain, but we like better the modesty of Grant. 
There have been rare scholars who had the pride 
of learning, but we like better the humility of 
Darwin. There have been able rulers who hon- 
estly believed that they were the State, but we 
like better the noble faith of Washington which 
led to his renunciation of power. When a man 
has come to think that he is necessary to a cause, 
the probability is that he has ceased to be neces- 
sary. We can hold second places in life without 
humility; we cannot long hold the first places 
without it. The fundamental difference between 
the self-made man and a man trained in the 
schools ought to appear in the greater humility 
of the scholar. If this does not appear, then he 
has missed the spirit of his calling. If books, and 
teachers, and the traditions of learning have any 
value to the spirit, it lies in this, that they 
make it reverent in the presence of the mind of 
the world. And yet, it is very difficult, I grant, 
to insure good breeding at this point in our col- 
leges. The vice of the old-time college was pro- 
vincialism. The college man was in a world of 
his own. His knowledge was not more of the 



THE MORALLY WELL-BRED MAN 141 

common kind, but different. His associations 
grew narrower from year to year. Even his hu- 
mor was unintelligible, as it still is in a measure, 
to the outer world. The vice of the modern col- 
lege is publicity, or to be more discriminating, a 
part of its life is under a fierce light, while an- 
other part is in shade. The college of to-day is 
under an unequal and contradictory impulse. The 
scholar lacks outward stimulus ; the athlete has 
an excess of it. The scholar has this advantage, 
that relatively he has more recognition to expect 
in his immediate future. The athlete has dis- 
counted to a large degree his immediate future. 
He passes at once out of the light into the shade. 
This is a severe test to the average man. I won- 
der that so many pass it so successfully. One 
would expect to find a larger proportion than 
really exists of college graduates who crave no- 
toriety, or who, for lack of outward stimulus, 
relapse into comparative inactivity. Still the pub- 
licity which attends so considerable a part of col- 
lege life makes it exceedingly difficult, as you all 
know, to develop the spirit of patient, independ- 
ent, and unostentatious work. The publicity of 
which I am speaking is responsible in part, I 
think, for the impatience and haste of college men 
to be in the world. The world is so near, it is so 
open, it has so much in common with the life 



142 PERSONAL POWER 

which one already knows, that it seems a waste 
of time to delay the transfer. This impatience 
may exist together with the uncertainty of which 
I spoke at the beginning, just as the same uncer- 
tainty may underlie the self-possession of the 
man of the world. 

But whatever the present difficulties may be 
in cultivating the spirit of humility in our col- 
leges, we have no option as to the duty. The 
charm, the persuasion of all high endeavor and 
action is the free, unconscious spirit which per- 
vades it, and this freedom of spirit is a sign of 
strength. Humility is the child of Faith, and Faith 
dowers her child with matchless gifts. Here lies, 
as I have often reminded you, the glory of the 
true religious life. "He that humbleth himself 
shall be exalted." I make no closing plea for 
any formal religion, but I do plead now as always 
for the religious spirit, for the spirit which makes 
a man aware of the fact that he is living in God's 
world, that he is a son of the Everlasting Father, 
and that here as hereafter he is to know himself 
by the rights, by the duties, and by the glory of 
his sonship. Seek, I pray you, moral distinction. 
Be not content with the commonplace in charac- 
ter any more than with the commonplace in am- 
bition or intellectual attainment. Do not expect 
that you will make any lasting, or any very strong 



THE MORALLY WELL-BRED MAN 143 

impression on the world through intellectual 
power without the use of an equal amount of 
conscience and heart. The laws of your being 
are against the experiment. Accept the moral 
law as you accept the law of gravitation. If you 
believe in justice with all your might, allowing 
no second beliefs, you will be just. If you love 
mercy with a passionate love, you will be merci- 
ful. If you have faith to the degree of humility, 
you will walk " sure-f ootedly " in the world. Make 
the brave, determined, intelligent endeavor to go 
right in your way among men. In so doing you 
will widen somewhat the pathway of justice, 
mercy, and faith for those about you. 



MORAL MATURITY 

"Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, even so do ye 
also to them: for this is the law and the prophets." — Matthew 
vii, 12. 

Jesus said that this saying of his was the law 
and the prophets, because to the men of his time 
these made the moral standard. But to us, his 
words have become more than the law and the pro- 
phets. We know the law and the prophets, and we 
know that they do not " find us " as these words 
of Jesus " find us." 

What is the ground of the advance ? Why is 
it that this saying of Jesus has outrun all other 
moral teachings and taken possession of the con- 
sciences of men? Because it really satisfies the 
consciences of men. We can see that it appeals 
to us more and more as we advance toward moral 
maturity. The law still speaks to us as capable 
of responding to authority. The prophets still 
speak to us as capable of responding to ideals. 
Jesus speaks to us as capable of responding to 
the sense of the human in ourselves and in all men. 
And it is, I believe, through this deepening sense 
of the human that we reach moral maturity. After 
we have passed under authority, after we have felt 



MORAL MATURITY 145 

the power of ideals, then Jesus can say to us as 
we begin to measure those forces which make up 
the play of human life, "Whatsoever ye would 
that men should do to you, even so do ye also to 
them." 

I wish to speak to you about Jesus' test of 
moral maturity. The discussion of this subject 
seems to me to be timely, for, as I believe, the 
chief lack in the moral power of our time lies in a 
certain immaturity. Good men among us are not 
inactive or cowardly. Whenever they fail it is 
usually for want of breadth and consistency of 
action. Reforms are carried, but they are not held. 
When the church takes the field it is apt to lack 
that magnificent steadiness and unity which mark 
the well-seasoned army. 

How do we reach moral maturity? Not by 
abiding always in the commandments. The liter- 
alism of obedience will surely leave us immature 
morally. Not by living altogether in the freedom 
and in the comparative irresponsibility of our 
ideals. The moral power of the mere idealist is 
too much like that of the amateur. When we 
take it into the world men call it academic. The 
order of moral advance is from commandments 
to ideals, and then from ideals to those actual 
personal standards which are wrought out in the 
contact of man with man. When we have proved 



146 PERSONAL POWER 

by actual trial that we are willing and able to do 
to men whatsoever we would that men should 
do to us, we have reached, according to Jesus' 
standard, moral maturity. 

Let me remind you that we belong to a gener- 
ation, in which, if the comparison is taken with 
other times, personal standards are more influen- 
tial than commandments or ideals. The present 
age is not capable of expressing itself very ef- 
fectively in the language of authority or in the 
language of inspiration. The characteristic of all 
ages which have been greatest in authority or 
inspiration, has been a certain overstatement of 
truth, a certain spiritual abandon in the utterance 
of it, sometimes expressing itself with the utmost 
daring of logic, sometimes in the like outburst of 
emotion. The Westminster Confession accepted 
and affirmed the sovereignty of God to the bitter 
end. The Declaration of Independence accepted 
and affirmed the equality of man far beyond the 
reach of modern democracy. Neither one of these 
could have been written in our time. We suffer 
them to abide with us, only as we revise and 
qualify them. We do not find men saying much or 
thinking much about a good many things which 
were once authoritative and quickening, and 
which will doubtless reappear in due time in 
honor and power. For the present, virtue seems 



MORAL MATURITY 147 

to lie in men and especially in their way of 
doing virtuous things. We seem to be more con- 
cerned to find the righteous man, or to make men 
capable of freedom, than we are concerned about 
righteousness or freedom. These terms themselves 
are less influential than they have been at some 
other times, apart from the deeds for which they 
stand. In a word, we are less responsive to what 
the best men are thinking, and more sensitive 
to the actions of men good or bad. Hence the 
peculiar urgency to-day of those personal stand- 
ards of conduct and duty which are embodied 
in the saying of Jesus, that we make ourselves 
capable of doing to men as we would have men 
do to us. 

And now that we have this saying of Jesus in 
its relation to the law and the prophets, let us 
try to understand the significance of the advance 
which He would have us make from command- 
ments and ideals to the more personal standards 
of conduct and duty. In the first place, this ad- 
vance of moral standard is significant because 
of the risk which it involves. It is a departure 
from a fixed standard. Law is fixed, and the 
ideal from its nature can never fall below a cer- 
tain level. To make the sense of right or jus- 
tice or charity as applied to one's self the moral 
standard, puts conduct evidently on a sliding 



148 PERSONAL POWER 

scale. The sense of right and justice and charity- 
is by no means equal among men. The applica- 
tion of the standard may work to the advantage 
of the inferior man, the man who is morally lower 
in his desires or purposes or methods of action. 
I challenge a man to fight a duel. He replies that 
that is not the way to settle a matter of right or 
wrong. But if I send the challenge, the proba- 
bility is that I should be perfectly willing that he 
should do to me as I have done to him. I am the 
inferior man, with the lower standard. A man 
who is financially competent refuses to join with 
others in securing better educational advantages 
for a community. " But," as others say to him, 
" it is for the good of your children." To which 
he replies, with the arrogance of the self-made 
man, " Have I not prospered with my education ? 
My education is good enough for my children " ; 
the inference being that it is good enough for 
anybody's children. This man does not ask the 
community to do for him or for his children any 
more than he is willing to contribute as his part 
toward the public good. He is simply the inferior 
man with the lower standard. And the applica- 
tion of the rule may work in like manner to the 
seeming advantage of the merely conventional- 
ized man, the man who has become so formalized 
socially or politically or religiously that he really 



MORAL MATURITY 149 

wants nothing better than that which can come 
to him through his set, or through his party, or 
through his sect. Progress must always wait for 
those who do not want the best things for them- 
selves. 

Here, then, is the risk involved in the advance 
from the more impersonal to the more personal 
standards of conduct and duty. It seems to put 
a certain power into the hands of the morally 
undeveloped or morally unprogressive person. But 
in counting the risk it is to be remembered that 
the same person is not usually susceptible to high 
ideals, and that he may be evasive of law. The 
conventionalized man is seldom open to ideals, 
and the man who is utterly lacking in public 
spirit has no liking for those laws which are the 
embodiment of public spirit. 

But in the second place this moral advance 
from commandments and ideals to the more per- 
sonal standards of conduct and duty is significant 
because it brings in a standard of practicable sever- 
ity. There is no finer discipline than for a man 
to compel himself to do the things which he would 
expect others in like circumstances to do, or to 
refrain from doing the things which he would 
expect others in like circumstances to refrain 
from doing. There is very little laxity about a 
man's judgment of the conduct or duty of others 



150 PERSONAL POWER 

in like condition with himself. His judgment is 
quite likely to be clear, definite, and unwaver- 
ing. It is a wholesome business for one to turn 
a trained and practiced judgment upon himself. 
Consistency requires him to do this, and consist- 
ency is inexorable in its demands. It is not easy 
to meet or to evade the charge of inconsistency, 
— the inconsistency, that is, between one's judg- 
ment of others and one's judgment of himself. 
Nothing hurts a sane and honest man so much 
as to find himself engaged in special pleading for 
himself. He cannot be tolerant of self-excuses 
from duty which he would not accept from an- 
other, nor of justification of his own conduct 
which he would not accept from another in re- 
spect to like conduct. The sense of inconsistency 
is about the most painful sense which a man can 
hold in his conscience. Conscience may relent 
somewhat toward one who falls away from his 
ideals, or who even violates a law, but it has no 
mercy for a man who does not play fair with his 
fellow men. The moral sensitiveness of our time 
is due very largely to the disturbed relations be- 
tween man and man. If society were at rest we 
should have more inward peace. As it is, one can 
hardly read of a great social disturbance, a strike, 
an outbreak, a war, without asking himself, What 
is my part in it? We instantly feel that somebody 



MORAL MATURITY 151 

is not doing to others as he would have others do 
to him ; but so complicated is the whole social 
structure that we cannot separate the wrongdoer, 
and set him apart even from ourselves. Over 
against the physical suffering which is associated 
with the great inequalities in social condition, 
there is a growing amount of very real mental 
and moral suffering on the part of those who feel, 
if they cannot remedy, every unrighted wrong. 
So definite and so severe is the penalty which in- 
heres in the social system, as definite and severe 
as any penalty which inheres in law or in ideals 
of duty. 

A still greater significance however, let me say 
in the third place, attaches to this moral advance 
from commandments and ideals to personal stand- 
ards of conduct and duty, because of its educat- 
ing power. A personal standard is an improvable 
thing, for the standard and the man are one and 
the same. The standard is the man desiring and 
purposing the best things for himself in order 
that he may make no inferior demands upon 
society. I have shown you the danger to society 
from the inferior man, the man of low objects 
and methods, who excuses himself from doing 
much for others because he asks little from 
others. On the other hand, great is the advan- 
tage to society from the man who expects much, 



152 PERSONAL POWER 

because he gives much. He sets the standard of 
giving and of receiving. "Whatsoever," Jesus 
says, "ye would that men should do to you, even 
so do ye also to them." That one word " whatso- 
ever " measures the difference between men. With 
some men it is a little word meaning no more than 
the barter of petty trade. With other men it is a 
full word standing for the exchange of the richest 
products of mind and heart in the market place 
of the world. "Whatsoever ye would." How 
much " would ye," and what shall it be ? It is one 
part of the business of education to answer these 
questions. It is, perhaps, the chief business of 
education to create the asking, and expectant, 
but discriminating mind. There is less danger 
from the over-asking, the grasping mind, than 
there is from the mind without desires and with- 
out demands. Discrimination is the after part of 
education. Eirst the creation of wants, the kin- 
dling of desires, then the refinement of the 
awakened and enlarged nature. 

One cannot overestimate the place of moral 
education in the enforcement of Christ's rule of 
life. It would have little meaning without that 
behind it. It might even become a dangerous 
rule, the means by which the inferior man might 
level down society. For a man to satisfy the first 
condition of the rule he must be able to raise 



MORAL MATURITY 153 

the level of capacity in men around him : and 
one way in which he may accomplish this end is 
simply by standing in his own person for the 
things which men ought to have, and having 
which they may be willing to exchange. I cannot 
overestimate the practical value of this educa- 
tional test which Christ's rule applies to our 
lives. Moral values are never inactive. The man 
of moral force is never absent. His presence is 
always felt. He is at work when he is silent and 
when he is at rest. His better tastes gradually 
refine others, his larger desires quicken their 
interests, his judgments increase the weight of 
public opinion. You can easily test the principle. 
What made the difference in the early attempts 
at the colonization of this country? Simply the 
intellectual and moral standard of the colonists 
themselves. Some wanted perishable, others 
wanted imperishable things. These all fixed for 
themselves, and for all who came after them, the 
valuation of their respective enterprises. What 
makes the differences in communities which are 
alike in outward conditions? Simply the presence 
or the absence of men of large and compelling 
wants. What makes the difference at different 
times in a given profession? It is simply the 
question whether the leaders are putting the pro- 
fession to its largest uses or are content with 



154 PERSONAL POWER 

secondary results. Within the past decade the 
profession which has made by far the greatest 
advance is the profession of medicine. It has no 
inherent advantage above the other professions. 
It is simply asking more questions, investigating 
more problems, daring to do braver things. There 
is no escape from the test in any department of 
life, or on the part of any man. To him that hath 
it shall be given, and he shall have abundantly. 
Men delight to give to the man who is intent on 
the true riches. His desires, purposes, and strug- 
gles, as well as his achievements, enrich the com- 
mon life. 

It is just here that we see, in the simple pre- 
sence of men of great and contagious desires, a 
certain charm and power in unconscious above 
conscious leadership. It is not the men who are 
looking behind to see if they have a following, 
who are our leaders. It is the men who are mov- 
ing straight on to their ends in the singleness 
and joy of their work : the investigator, baffled 
but undaunted, the reformer as indifferent to flat- 
tery as to criticism, the genuine seeker after the 
truth, whose life says to us as he moves on — 
" that I may know him and the power of his re- 
surrection and the fellowship of his sufferings." 
There is no power so great or so influential as 
the simple power which comes of minding one's 



MORAL MATURITY 155 

own business, provided it be a great and an un- 
selfish business. What matters it to me that an- 
other man's work is not mine? If he is doing it 
grandly I can do mine the better. 

But the chief significance of this advance from 
commandments and ideals to personal standards 
of conduct and duty lies in the right and power 
of the moral initiative which it confers upon the 
stronger and better souls. What right have we 
to interfere with the superstition or ignorance or 
weakness of men, with anything in fact that falls 
short of the wickedness of the world? What is 
the justification of the reformer, the philanthro- 
pist, the missionary? Why should one fight other 
men's battles ? Why should one stir in other men 
discontent with their condition ? Why should any 
one go anywhere on any errand among men where 
he has not been asked to go, and where his pre- 
sence is not altogether welcome? What business 
has a man in any community to be public-spir- 
ited ? All these and like questions have but one 
answer, namely, the moral right of one man to 
put himself in another man's place to the end of 
his relief or gain. It was in the exercise of this 
right that Jesus came to men. He claimed no 
other right for his presence here. " Ye know," 
Paul says, " the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he 



156 PERSONAL POWER 

became poor, that ye through his poverty might 
be rich." It is by virtue of this right that men 
and nations which have taken the christian way 
have wrought in the interest of the weak, the 
oppressed, the darkened, and the depraved. The 
right may be exercised without judgment or tact, 
and expose those who use it to just criticism, but 
the right itself has earned its place among the 
high privileges open to all who are able to honor 
them. 

There is but one recognized objection to the 
exercise of this right. The strong man who puts 
himself in place of the weak may superimpose 
himself upon the weaker brother. He may fail to 
interpret his real needs, or to satisfy his possible 
desires. He may patronize, not help. He may 
change, not develop, the life he seeks to reach. 
And the objection grows in weight when it can 
be fitly applied to a nation or to the church. It 
is not the business of a nation of any type to set 
up feeble imitations of itself, but rather to guar- 
antee normal political development. It is not the 
business of the church possessed of the mission- 
ary spirit to convert men to forms of church gov- 
ernment or to specific creeds, but rather to the 
reality and freedom of Christianity. In this fact 
lies the growing delicacy of the political and reli- 
gious relations of the Western to the Eastern 



MORAL MATURITY 157 

peoples. By a singular providence it is the task 
of the most modern Christianity to address itself 
to the most ancient of peoples, peoples which had 
been brooding over the problem of human des- 
tiny before we were born. Not altogether in 
vain had been that long searching after God if 
haply He might be found. The religious expe- 
rience of the great non-christian races is not a 
thing to be ignored, least of all to be insulted. 
By so doing, men may do despite to the spirit of 
God. Many of the spiritual qualities which have 
been slowly and painfully wrought in compara- 
tive darkness are yet to shine forth in the light 
of Christendom. It has not been revealed that 
"Western Christianity is the final Christianity. It 
has not been revealed that the perfect man in 
Christ Jesus is to come out of the North or the 
South, out of the East or the West. When Phil- 
lips Brooks gave his memorable sermon on a 
fourth of July in Westminster Abbey, he said 
that the cry of one nation to another is, " Show 
us your man." Let our Western Christianity show 
its man, but not as the final type. Let our West- 
ern democracy declare its principles among the 
nations, but not assume that it is the perfect law 
of liberty. We have yet some things to learn 
about government and much more about Chris- 
tianity. But with the qualification of a just humil- 



158 PERSONAL POWER 

ity, and of a reasonable tact, there is nothing to 
qualify the right of the moral initiative. The 
order is upon us, according to the value which 
we set on what is to us a gospel, — that we go 
into all the world and preach the gospel to every 
creature. 

But you may ask, Is there any large opportu- 
nity to-day for the use of the moral initiative ? Is 
there the like opportunity to that which called 
out the brave word of young Mills to his class- 
mates at Williams, — "We ought to carry the 
Gospel to dark and heathen lands and we can do 
it if we will " ? Is there the like opportunity to 
that which called out the strenuous word of the 
early anti-slavery agitator, " I will not equivocate, 
I will not compromise, I will not retreat a single 
inch, and I will be heard"? Is there the like 
opportunity to those who brought in the move- 
ments for prison reform, factory legislation, or 
the greater educational and charitable develop- 
ments of more recent times ? Let us think again, 
not overlooking things near at hand, and the 
question answers itself. Is there a city in the 
land which is not calling upon its citizens to take 
the moral initiative in its behalf and in their own 
behalf ? Has there not been a steadily increasing, 
and as yet unsatisfied demand for the moral ini- 
tiative in the interest of peace in the economic 



MORAL MATURITY 159 

world ? A well-known political leader was cred- 
ited with the saying that he would rather be in- 
strumental in settling permanently the labor dis- 
turbances of the country than in gaining the 
presidency. If he could have satisfied that ambi- 
tion, he would have made for himself a place of 
honor in the land which any president might 
envy. Opportunities for moral initiative lie at 
hand in any really vital calling in which a man 
may engage, for we are to remember that every 
advance made through the physical and intellec- 
tual initiative of our time raises its own moral 
issues. There is not a business into which a man 
can enter which he will not at some time have 
the chance to make morally better. There is no 
business so good in itself that it cannot always 
be made better by the impulse of the moral initia- 
tive. That is just what the ministry always needs. 
Let no man ever rely upon his business, even 
though it be that of saving men, to save him- 
self. Back in himself there must lie by the grace 
of God the saving power, the power to trans- 
mute commandments and ideals into a living 
force. 

I have been speaking to you of that moral ad- 
vance, that advance toward moral maturity, which 
Jesus urges upon us in his familiar words, that 
we do to others as we would have others do to us. 



160 PERSONAL POWER 

I have tried to take these words out of the reli- 
gious commonplace into which they have fallen, 
and to set them again in the place in which they 
belong in the teachings of Jesus. "Think not 
that I am come," He said, " to destroy the law, or 
the prophets : I am not come to destroy, but to ful- 
fil " — and this is their fulfillment, that " What- 
soever ye would that men should do to you, even 
so do ye also to them." And this is the way of 
their fulfillment. 

Do not let the inferior man, be he the man of 
lower aims, or the merely conventionalized man, 
bring you down to the level of his obligations. 
Do not shrink from applying to yourselves the 
judgments which you may fairly apply to others. 
Train yourselves to desires and tastes, to intel- 
lectual and moral necessities, which will set the 
standards of giving and receiving in your own 
communities and in your professions. Above all, 
earn for yourselves the right and the power of 
taking the moral initiative among men to the bet- 
tering of the common work, to the helping of the 
world, to the saving of the lost. 

Let us keep the commandments ; let us not be 
satisfied with keeping the commandments. Let 
us cherish our ideals : let us not be satisfied with 
visions of duty. Christianity is the religion of the 
actual, that is, the religion of the human. Its 



MORAL MATURITY 161 

great qualities are justice, courage, aspiration, and 
sacrifice. So far as we know, the sphere of its 
working is this world. 

Let me put before you in concrete form Christ's 
own interpretation of his words. There came to 
Him one day, as you recall, a man well trained in 
the commandments, with his mind open to ideals, 
but unsatisfied, still seeking some higher end. 
" Good Master, what shall I do ? " " Go, sell that 
thou hast and give to the poor and come follow 
me." Come out from behind the commandments, 
take the open field, dream no longer, come with 
me among men. And he said no, sorrowfully, 
but effectively. He made what Dante called the 
"grand refusal." Doubtless the vision of the 
greater duty came to him again and again, but 
for aught we know he dwelt as aforetime within 
the safety of the commandments. Had he met 
the opportunity of that day with Jesus, his name 
might have been as familiar to us as the name of 
Paul. Perhaps his acceptance of Jesus' call might 
have made Paul unnecessary. The man failed, as 
you see, just where we are failing. His moral 
power never came to maturity. It never won him 
a place or a name among men. It never made 
him distinctly a christian, a follower of Christ 
and co-worker with Him. 

He represents the great majority of well-trained 



162 PERSONAL POWER 

and well-intentioned men who never come to 
moral maturity. And yet the words of Jesus are 
becoming more practicable, not less practicable. 
Men and nations are slowly learning the better 
way. The morality of the civilized world is not 
as crude and raw, or as visionary as it was a cen- 
tury or even a generation ago. In spite of social 
conflicts, in spite of wars, men and nations are 
more patient with one another, more sensitive to 
the wrong, even when they do wrong, more ca- 
pable of putting themselves, man by man, or na- 
tion by nation, in another's place. I count it the 
great moral obligation of all believing men to 
have faith in the working power of Christ's say- 
ings. They will be no more true a hundred years 
hence than they are to-day, but we can make 
them more evidently true before we are done 
with them. And to this end, keep your faith, I 
pray you, in men. Faith in God has been defined 
as trusting Him against appearances. Believe in 
men against appearances. Do not take men at 
their word when they talk below themselves. Use 
the true, never the false, in human nature, and 
persist in doing this. So shall you gain access, 
every one of you in his own way, to the heart of 
humanity. So too shall you get your return from 
the heart of humanity. Action and reaction are 



MORAL MATURITY 163 

equal in the moral as in the physical world. 
"Give, and it shall be given unto you; good 
measure, pressed down, shaken together, running 
over, shall men give into your bosom." 



XI 



THE SATISFACTIONS OF LIFE IN THE MIDST 
OF ITS CONTRADICTIONS 

"He hath made everything beautiful in its time: also he hath 
set eternity in their heart, yet so that man cannot find out the work 
that God hath done from the beginning even to the end." — Eccle- 
siastes iii, 11. 

Do you know of any bolder setting of human 
life than lies outlined in these successive state- 
ments, — the ceaseless changes which make up 
the attractiveness of the world, the unalterable 
sense of the permanent in the heart of man, and 
the mystery which broods alike over the change- 
able and the permanent? Here we have stated 
without the slightest reserve all those conditions 
which produce the contradiction of life as we 
know it ; but what a glorious contradiction it is ! 
What condition would you change ? Would you 
make the world less attractive? Would you 
shorten man to the measure of time rather than 
of eternity ? Would you break the mystery and 
let a man know the things which God knows? 
No. The glory of human life is in its contradic- 
tions, not apparent simply but real, and the im- 
mediate end of human life is to find satisfaction 
in them. 



THE SATISFACTIONS OF LIFE 165 

Let me speak to you of the Satisfactions of 
Life, the satisfactions which you may reasonably 
expect to find in your lives, in the midst of the 
contradictions in which you are to live. 

You will agree with me when I say that it 
makes a vast difference to any man to what word 
he commits his future. Contentment, for ex- 
ample, is a rare word, but not the word through 
which to plan a career. Success is a fascinating 
word, a word of leadership, but not the word to 
put in charge of a man's soul. We want a word 
which will not restrain any legitimate power, and 
we want a word which will not mock us with the 
goal to which it may bring us. I do not know of 
any word which it is really worth while for any 
man to put before himself except satisfaction. 
What if a man is contented, and unsatisfied ? 
What if a man is successful, tremendously suc- 
cessful, and unsatisfied? 

But you ask me, Is satisfaction a practical 
word ? Does it stand for things within reach to- 
day ? Can we really do better than to aim at con- 
tentment, or at success, and take the chance of 
satisfaction ? 

Let me answer your question by saying that as 
the world has outgrown the discontent of medie- 
valism it is just as surely outgrowing the smug 
contentment of modern materialism. I say this in 



166 PEKSONAL POWER 

full view of the open worship of success and of 
successful men. Medisevalism is a lost cause, and 
modern materialism is a waning cause. You can- 
not recall the one, you cannot long detain the 
other. The better man among us, the man who is 
beginning to lead the way to better things, is the 
man who has " come to himself," who has recov- 
ered his place in the world, who has felt the stir- 
ring of that " eternity" which has been set in his 
heart, and who therefore sees that it is equally 
foolish to protest against the attractiveness of the 
world, and to surrender himself recklessly to it. 
I will try to make this fact plain to you, not by 
example, but by showing you some of the sources 
of satisfaction which are opening to men in the 
world as we may know it. 

One present source of satisfaction lies in the 
growing power to interpret the world. In other 
words, this is becoming again the scholar's world. 
And this means in turn that the outer world which 
is at times so satisfying to the senses, and at other 
times so unsatisfying, is becoming a source of con- 
sistent satisfaction to the intellectual life. He hath 
made everything beautiful ? No. Some things are 
terribly ugly. He hath made everything beautiful 
in its time. The word of the modern scholar is 
order. He puts things into their place. The thing 
which is ugly here may take on beauty there. Under 



THE SATISFACTIONS OF LIFE 167 

his rearrangement Nature is no longer a creature 
of passions and moods, but of powers working to 
appointed ends. He sees the reason of her wastes 
and of her economics. He learns by patient ob- 
servation the law of her times and seasons, that 
there is " a time to plant, and a time to pluck up 
that which is planted ; a time to cast away stones, 
and a time to gather stones together ; a time to 
break down, and a time to build up." And as he 
reads nature so he reads history. He no longer 
revels in battles, but he sees their place in the 
order of human events. Here too there is " a time 
to kill, and a time to heal ; a time for war, and a 
time for peace.' ' Human nature cannot get into 
shape, any more than nature can, without cost. 
The price of all movement, of all advance, is sac- 
rifice of some kind. The deadly thing among na- 
tions, as in nature, is stagnation. The most serious 
judgment passed upon any people, a judgment 
which we of to-day can well understand and apply, 
is the prophetic word spoken concerning Moab. 
" Moab hath been at ease from his youth, and he 
hath settled on his lees, and hath not been emptied 
from vessel to vessel, neither hath he gone into 
captivity : therefore his taste remaineth in him, 
and his scent is not changed." Now the outcome 
of education, certainly of the higher education, 
is not the disciplined mind, but the man himself 



168 PERSONAL POWER 

made capable of using his mind to satisfying ends. 
The educated man is not simply the sharpened 
man, able to work with keener edge among his 
fellows, in the ways and among the things where 
they are working. Modern education means in- 
sight, method, the power to interpret; and if a 
man chooses to turn his back upon these things, 
he turns his back upon the best part of his train- 
ing, with the probable result that the end reached 
is some kind of success, without satisfaction. It 
is a melancholy thing to see an educated man in 
the world of to-day altogether gone astray intel- 
lectually. 

Another present source of satisfaction in life 
lies in the widening opportunity for a man to com- 
municate himself to the world, to make his per- 
sonal contribution to its permanent value. The 
fact that it is the habit of this age to express its 
values in commercial terms does not narrow the 
opportunity. There have been ages in which a 
man could give only himself. We have this heri- 
tage in some of the older professions in which the 
personal element is still the dominant element, — 
the ministry, medicine in some of its services, 
teaching, and art in its deepest expression. And 
they still have the advantage in this, that personal 
power can be most easily capitalized, and can be 
used with the most certainty. But suppose that a 



THE SATISFACTIONS OF LIFE 169 

man wishes to give at a second remove from him- 
self, how abounding are the opportunities, pro- 
vided he will acquire the necessary capital — 
money, position, or a following — and still hold 
to his purpose. The danger is that he will lose his 
purpose, if not himself, somewhere in the process. 
I suppose that many of you intend to make money, 
and that not one of you intends to end as a simple 
getter of money. You propose to yourselves some 
kind of beneficent action which will increase the 
value of the world to others. Your intention shows 
that you see the opportunity. All that you need 
is to begin to act as soon as you have the means 
of acting, and before you lose the motive power 
to action. Very few men are able to hold a virtue 
without exercising it. Recognize the fact at once, 
and never lose sight of it, that a thousand ways 
are open to you for communicating yourselves to 
the world, to join in that movement which is now 
plain and well defined of making the world in all 
its peoples self-supporting, of enlarging its useful 
resources, of refining its power, of saving it. And 
all this, you and others like you will be able to do 
because you belong to the permanent order of the 
world. You have within you that strange, solemn, 
joyous, powerful sense which this old-time writer 
called "eternity." He hardly knew whether to 
call it eternity or the world itself, it was something 



170 PERSONAL POWER 

so great and abiding, so imperishable. But there 
it was, set in the heart of man, and if he would 
recognize and honor it, it would help him to do 
lasting things. Man may seem to himself at times 
a pilgrim and a stranger in the earth, but he is 
not a transient. He goes, but he leaves behind 
him the fact of his presence. Nature cannot eradi- 
cate it. You visit Greece. You find there at least 
four civilizations buried in her soil. There if any- 
where Matthew Arnold may sing the song of the 
triumph of nature over man. 

" Race after race, man after man, 
Have thought that my secret was theirs, 
Have dreamed that I lived but for them, 
That they were my glory and joy, — 
They are dust, they are changed, they are gone, 
I remain." 

Yes, nature remains as beautiful as ever in that 
land of men, but man also remains. The imper- 
ishable presence of his past is there, it is here, it 
is everywhere. Nature holds the grave of the 
man she buried with his works, but he is not 
there, he is risen, his spirit is in all the world. 
He has inhabited every age since his own, and 
has ruled the best. Alas ! for the generation which 
has no room for him, unless it can learn from 
some other source the satisfaction of communicat- 
ing the imperishable spirit of a race to the world. 

I cannot part company with this thought with- 



THE SATISFACTIONS OF LIFE 171 

out suggesting to you a kindred source of satis- 
faction, if you are really seeking satisfying ends, 
in the growing companionship of like-minded 
men. I suppose that there is no satisfaction so 
great as that which comes to a man who stands 
alone, or thinks he stands alone, in his witness to 
a righteous cause. The figure of the prophet with 
the cry on his lips, " I alone am left," is not pa- 
thetic, it is majestic. But such satisfaction is rare. 
It is limited to individuals, and to those only in 
infrequent generations. We find our ordinary 
satisfactions in our fellowships. Like-mindedness 
is the secret of fellowship. And the number of 
like-minded people who are weary of show and 
pretense, who want sincerity in social life as they 
want reality in thought, or honesty in business, 
is greatly on the increase. I believe that the 
number is under-estimated because of our reti- 
cence on serious subjects. We are not yet set 
free from the reign of cynicism and distrust and 
unbelief which marked the advent of materialism. 
We are still loath "to speak our minds" except 
in criticism. But let a man speak according to 
the sincerity of his convictions or in the simplic- 
ity of his faith, be it among the many or, what 
is far more difficult, among the few, and straight- 
way heart answereth to heart as face answereth to 
face in the water. 



172 PERSONAL POWER 

I was talking recently with a gentleman who 
was a guest at the dinner given to Herbert Spen- 
cer when he visited this country. Most of the 
guests were agnostics. Mr. Beecher, who was an 
admirer of Mr. Spencer, was also a guest. The 
after-dinner speaking, begun by Mr. Spencer, 
was chiefly, as my friend said, along the line of 
negation, and as it continued it became depress- 
ing. Mr. Beecher was the last speaker. Without 
controversy, but with sincerity, he asserted the 
rights of the spirit. Gradually but surely men 
began to respond to his words. It was deep an- 
swering to deep, till at the close the whole com- 
pany rose with one accord and hailed the speaker 
with what seemed to my friend to be the very 
passion of their souls. 

It is, of course, obvious to say that we cannot 
take any sure satisfaction in life without at least 
the courage to face the great mystery in which 
we live and work. Faith has a better office for 
us than courage, though courage is a considerable 
part of faith. Faith is actually the product, vary- 
ing in its parts according to the individual, of 
reason and courage. And this statement in no 
wise contravenes the assertion of Scripture that 
faith is the gift of God. What greater gifts can 
God bestow upon man as a religious being than 
reason and courage, — reason that he may know 



THE SATISFACTIONS OF LIFE 173 

his rights in the universe, and courage that he 
may defend them ; reason that he may have ac- 
cess to truth, and courage that he may enter in 
and possess it ; reason that he may be kept from 
superstition and error and folly, and courage that 
he may not fall away into indifference and ease 
of soul. I would have you believe that there was 
never a better time than now for the exercise of 
a rational and courageous faith. True, as I said 
at the beginning, the contradictions of life are 
very evident and very real to us. But, as I said 
also, they add to the glory of human life as we 
know it. The problem of faith is not so simple 
to us as it was to the medievalist. He simply 
went into his closet, and shut his door on the 
world. There was nothing for him to do there but 
to speculate. His mind grew curious, impatient of 
mystery. We accept mystery. It is to us the at- 
mosphere which keeps the earth soft as with 
showers, and the world fresh and young. We are 
great searchers, but we are not curious. We are 
trying to find out the work of God, but we are 
not asking, I think, unnecessary or improper 
questions. And in our search we are coming 
nearer than men have ever come to the great 
underlying unity. If everything in the world is 
beautiful in its time, if there is order here, there 
must be order everywhere. If you have found the 



174 PERSONAL POWER 

arc, you can cast the circle. That is the business 
of faith. Keason traces the line inch by inch. 
Faith discovers the curve and projects it. 

It seems to me that our age is the most reverent 
of all the christian ages in its thinking, follow- 
ing most closely the method of the great Teacher. 
He never broke the silences of God. He kept the 
mystery. But He taught men how to reason from 
the seen to the unseen. " He that hath seen me 
hath seen the Father." " If God so clothe the 
grass of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow 
is cast into the oven; shall he not much more 
clothe you, ye of little faith? " " Love your en- 
emies and do them good and lend, never despair- 
ing, and your reward shall be great : and ye shall 
be sons of the Most High." It was this method of 
teaching religious truth and religious life which 
the apostle of Jesus' own heart adopted, and which 
enabled him to utter, as if in common speech, the 
calmest and yet the most triumphant word of the 
christian faith. " Now are we children of God, 
and it is not yet made manifest what we shall 
be. We know that, if he shall be manifested, we 
shall be like him." 

Such, then, are some of the sources of a satis- 
fying life. But if a man is unsuccessful, you will 
say, will he be satisfied? No, I think not. He 
may fall back into contentment, (no mean place,) 



THE SATISFACTIONS OF LIFE 175 

but satisfaction is a very positive, and active, and 
efficient state. It assumes employment, progress, 
the full action of all powers within us, and there- 
fore the expectation if not the assurance of suc- 
cess. To say that a very successful man may be a 
very unsatisfied man, is far from saying that an 
unsuccessful man will be, or can be, a satisfied 
man. Success is the word of achievement. Let us 
guard it, but never abridge it. Let us be sure that 
through all the excitement and joy of achieve- 
ment there runs the deep undertone of satisfac- 
tion. 

I would not have you think so meanly of your 
time, as to suppose that you have nothing more 
to expect from it than contentment or unsatisfy- 
ing success. You may go wrong in your way in 
the world, — may God keep you from that, — but 
I would not have you blunder in your thought of 
the world. I would not have you think of the 
world that is to be yours as identical with that 
which we are even now outgrowing. The modern 
world, as you are to know it, is not, or will not 
long be, the world which marked the sudden shift 
from medievalism. The reaction is spent. Neither 
is it the world of raw force, and of rank material 
power, as men knew it at first. The noise and 
smoke of its work, its sudden and unstable wealth, 
its pride and vain glory, its impossible art, its 



176 PERSONAL POWER 

commercialized morals, its crude, self-sufficient, 
unbelieving man, all these are fast going the way 
of their kind. These do not make up the world 
of to-morrow, the world in which your achieve- 
ments are to be ranked, and in which you are to 
be measured. You are to know a world which 
will have ample room in it for the intellectual 
life, for rewarding action of every kind, for sin- 
cere and satisfying companionship, and for faith. 
Do not miss your place in it. Do not live out of 
date. Make your own generation. Take the bet- 
ter fortune of your own time. And to do this, 
learn to think rightly of it. Be sure therefore 
that you think rightly of yourselves, for as you 
think of yourselves you will estimate your world. 
If God has set some great and abiding thing in 
your heart, if He has set " eternity " there, and 
you recognize it and are true to it, He will not 
mock you with an unsatisfied life, either here 
or hereafter. 



XII 



SECOND USES OF MEN — THE RECOVERY OF 
PERSONAL POWER 

" He made it again another vessel." — Jeremiah xviii, 4. 

The word of the Lord, which usually came to 
this prophet through direct inspiration, came to 
him at one time saying, " Arise, and go down 
to the potter's house, and there I will cause thee 
to hear my words." The prophet thus describes 
the object-lesson which he was sent there to study. 
The potter was "making a work on the wheels," 
that is, he was working out a design in the clay, 
shaping it according to the object which he had 
in mind. But the work was not successful. " The 
vessel that he made of the clay was marred in the 
hand of the potter." Then the prophet saw that 
the potter, instead of flinging away the clay out 
of which came the imperfect work, — " the marred 
vessel," — took again the same clay, moulded it 
afresh, put it again upon the wheel, and made it 
another vessel. 

The object-lesson, as you see, was very simple 
and very plain. The moral which Jehovah drew 
from it was equally plain and explicit, almost 
impatient in its tone. " Have not I the right to 



178 PERSONAL POWER 

deal with men and with nations as this potter 
has dealt with this clay? Must I fling away a man 
or a nation if marred in the making? If there is 
repentance shall I not forgive, and if I forgive 
shall I not seek to restore ? " 

We will understand then, as the outcome of 
this prophetic lesson, that in the plan of God 
there are second uses for men who fail of the 
first intention of God in their lives. Personal 
power, when abused, or reduced, or wasted, may 
be to a degree, and to some worthy end, re- 
covered. I do not know how we could live 
without this assurance. The venture of life is 
not with any of us the venture of perfection. A 
world in which no provision had been made for 
failures, or for those moral disasters which might 
otherwise leave us the wrecks of sin, would be 
to all of us an impossible world. When we sin, 
however grievous may be our sin, we need more 
than forgiveness, however assuring that may be. 
We need reinstatement in the very object of 
our lives, or if our sin or our blundering has made 
that impracticable, then the opportunity to realize 
some object of actual value. We have the right 
to believe, I repeat, that it is not in the plan 
of God that any man should be so " marred " in 
the making that if he may not become the man 
he might have been, or ought to have been, he 



SECOND USES OF MEN 179 

may not yet become a man after God's second 
uses. And many such there have been who have 
shown us how high and noble an end may thus 
be achieved. 

In speaking to you about this recovery of per- 
sonal power when it has been wasted or appar- 
ently lost, I may not speak to the immediate 
experience of any of you. But I think that I 
shall speak none the less a timely word, if in 
what I may say, I anticipate certain possible ex- 
periences and try to prepare you for them. It is 
a very great thing to have one's moral and spirit- 
ual life restored to him, quite as great as to ex- 
perience the restoration of physical life. Indeed, 
as I have already intimated, it is quite conceiv- 
able that the second use of a man's life may far 
exceed the first use, as he may have understood 
it. The sainthood of not a few of the more virile 
saints dates from the recovery of personal power. 
Of course I am not considering now so indefinite, 
or what is relatively so inconsiderable a matter, 
as changes in our personal plans. This kind of 
change is going on continuously in our lives, and 
usually it involves no moral consequences. What 
I have in mind entirely is that kind of moral 
weakening through which we lose our grip on 
some first and really satisfying purpose, or that 
kind of immoral inconsistency through which we 



180 PERSONAL POWER 

may be obliged to abandon such a purpose. And 
what I would have you see clearly, and believe 
without a doubt, is the fact that there is room 
in the plan of God for every man who finds him- 
self in any such condition, — room not only for 
the saving of himself, but for the saving of him- 
self to his work. 

But if we are to get the real meaning of this 
fact so as to be able to apply it in the time of 
need, we must start with the presumption that 
there is an intention, a purpose of God, in each 
of our lives. To presume this is only to accept in 
concrete form the saying of the philosophers that 
" God thinks in terms of life." Dr. Bushnell en- 
titled one of his most positive and searching ser- 
mons, " Every Man's Life a Plan of God," — 
a thought which he expanded in the proposition 
" that God has a definite life-plan for every hu- 
man person, girding him, visibly or invisibly, for 
some exact thing, which it will be the true sig- 
nificance and glory of his life to have accom- 
plished." How do we know, you ask, that such is 
the fact, if it be a fact ? And if we do not know 
the fact, and just what it means, of what use is 
it to us? Let us start, I answer, with the pre- 
sumption that there is an intention or purpose of 
God in the lives of men, and see if that pre- 
sumption does not fit the best interpretation we 






SECOND USES OF MEN 181 

can give to human life. The fact that a man can- 
not see the purpose of God in his life is no proof 
that it does not exist. We can see abundant rea- 
son why it should not appear. We should be- 
come at once and continuously involved in the 
tyranny of detail. We should lose out of our 
lives the joy of discovery. We should cease to be 
free workers. Not so does God enter into part- 
nership with us. His sovereignty is adjusted to 
the fact that we are made in his image. Herein 
is the guarantee of our freedom, but herein also 
is the assurance that we have not been made in 
vain. If man is a purposeful creation, it is cer- 
tainly consistent to believe that every man is ca- 
pable of fulfilling a purpose. And so far as we 
can see, the whole scheme of the discipline of 
human life is based upon this idea. Moral truth 
we know is everywhere individualized. Take the 
commandments. The moral law was not given to 
man, but to men. "Thou shalt not" do this; 
" Thou shalt not " do that. I think that every 
time a man really hears one of the commandments 
it makes him feel his individuality. And all the 
more because of the negative way in which it is 
put. If I am made conscious of the power to do 
the thing which is forbidden, the power to lie, to 
steal, to kill, I am also made conscious of the 
power to do the very things which are most op- 



182 PERSONAL POWER 

posed to those which I must not do, the power 
to tell the truth, to give of my possessions to 
others, to save the lives of my fellow men. Only 
on this positive side of action there is immea- 
surable freedom and immeasurable range of activ- 
ity. You can tell a man just what he cannot do : 
you cannot tell a man with equal plainness just 
what he can do. There is a hidden capacity for 
right doing which eludes all definition. God him- 
self does not attempt to catalogue right actions. 
Here, I repeat, lies our freedom, but are we any 
the less sure because of this, of the presence 
within us and around us of " the power, not our- 
selves, which makes for righteousness," or are we 
any the less sure that this "power" is intelligent, 
cooperative, and purposeful? 

Or take again that marvelous interplay of in- 
centive in human life which is so thoroughly in- 
dividualized. It is impossible for one to do a 
conspicuously fine or noble deed without thereby 
speaking to his fellow men, as it were by name, 
in the way of incentive. True, a bad act if made 
attractive may be a temptation. But most bad 
acts at the time, and all bad acts in the end, how- 
ever attractive they may have been, create revul- 
sion. There is no revulsion from good acts. On 
the contrary, the good act, if it be touched with 
any of the finer qualities like courage or sacrifice, 



SECOND USES OF MEN 183 

communicates itself with an indescribable energy 
and influence to each one within its range. It 
seems to me that this organized interplay of in- 
fluence of man upon man shows as clearly the 
intention of God in our individual lives, as do 
the commandments. Only here we have the posi- 
tive, not the negative side. Has it never seemed 
to you, as you have felt the thrill of some noble 
act, or have found yourself in the presence of 
some ennobling soul, as if God were saying to 
you, "Look, that is what you can do, that is what 
you can be"? So does God continually remind us 
of ourselves, of the possibilities which lie within 
us, which He cannot fully define, but of which 
He can apprise us through the accomplished re- 
sult in other men. 

Or take yet again those more direct interfer- 
ences and compulsions which make up so much of 
what we call the discipline of life. I have no 
doubt that more of us fail to realize God's inten- 
tions and purposes for us, through yielding to 
the hesitancies of our nature, than through diso- 
bedience, or the lack of responsiveness to quick- 
ening examples. Most of us are guilty of weari- 
ness in well doing. We stop short of the end 
which is clearly discernible and in every way to 
be desired. And so were it not for the compul- 
sion or interference which seems at times so hard 



184 PERSONAL POWER 

to bear, many a man who really knows the pur- 
pose of his life, and feels the incentives which are 
urging him to reach it, would fail of the end be- 
cause of this hesitancy, this halting by the way, 
this not infrequent turning back. Those of you 
who are familiar with the prose writings of the 
poet Moore may recall the story of the young 
Greek who sought to be initiated into the mys- 
teries of the Egyptian religion. The process of 
initiation consisted in part of serious physical 
tests, among which was this : In an underground 
temple on the banks of the Nile, he was carried 
swiftly along an inclined plane, and, suddenly 
brought to a halt, was left alone, far down in the 
darkness. After a while there came a glimmer of 
light from above, and at the instant a stairway 
swung within his reach. He caught it and began 
to climb. When he had taken a step he heard a 
plash in the water below. The stair on which he 
had trodden was gone. As he took another step 
he heard another plash. Step by step the stairway 
fell apart. There was nothing for him to do but 
to climb. Have we not all seen men climbing just 
so? Who swung the stairway within their reach ? 
Who made the backward step impossible? Who 
forced them up in the light ? Let us never leave 
out of account the compulsions of God in our 
interpretation of the better lives of men. 



SECOND USES OF MEN 185 

Are we not warranted in the assumption, may 
I not call it a belief, that the first use of a man's 
life represents the thought, or intention, or plan 
of God, for him? But if this be a true assump- 
tion, justifying the emphasis which I put upon 
it, why are we not equally warranted, you may 
ask, in believing for the same reasons that a 
second or still further use of a man's life is also 
according to the purpose of God ? Most assur- 
edly we are warranted in so believing; this is the 
very assurance which I would have you take with 
all your heart, but I would not have you take it 
in the way of an easy inference. For between the 
first and any after use of a man's life something 
has always intervened which cannot be overlooked 
or passed by. Some moral lapse has befallen a man 
which leaves him in a degree another man, not only 
in the thought of God, but also in his own thought 
and feeling. That is why we are now talking 
about the recovery of personal power rather than 
about the continuous use of it. Something has 
gone away from a man, or gone out of him, which 
he is trying to get back, and which God is trying 
to help him to recover. And with the recovery, 
preceding it and attending it, there are experi- 
ences on our part, and efforts on the part of God, 
of which we must take account. 

Let us look into this matter. How do we come 



186 PERSONAL POWER 

to lose personal power? How do we fall away 
from the first uses of our lives? Of course in 
answering these questions we must go below the 
object lesson before the prophet. The analogy 
fails at the point we are considering. A man is 
not simply clay in the hands of the potter. What 
is imperfection in the clay may be sin in the man. 
While the moral of the object-lesson holds good 
in spite of this difference, the difference is of im- 
mense concern as affecting the treatment of a 
human soul in the hands of God. 

There are certain causes, to which I will briefly 
refer, which explain the moral lapses of men in 
respect to their uses, which in fact make the occa- 
sions for the recovery of personal power. Con- 
sider the effect upon a man's usefulness, the full 
use of himself, of the waste of time. You can 
hardly think of a spendthrift as a useful person. 
Suppose that in this sense one has " spent " twenty 
years of time. Did God plan his life with that 
waste in view? I do not charge to the account 
of these empty years dissipation or injustice. I 
simply let them stand empty. Can that amount 
of time be taken out of any man's life and he be 
left a useful man, according to any first use to 
which God could put him? And if this be not 
possible, is it fitting for a man to take up his life 
and try to go on with it, without a thought of 



SECOND USES OF MEN 187 

the squandered years, expecting that God will be 
equally thoughtless? Do you not see that even 
so common a matter as the waste of time must 
make a difference in a man's thought of himself, 
and in God's thought of him ? 

Or consider as clearly akin to the loss of per- 
sonal power from the waste of time, that which 
comes in so frequently through the loss of the 
affirmative out of our lives. "Man's first word is 
yes, his second no, his third and last, yes." This 
was the saying of a very broad and keen observer 
of men. It would not be fair to say that this loss 
of the affirmative always represents distinctly a 
moral loss. And yet the fact remains that when 
the power of response has gone, or is suspended, 
there has gone with it the power of effective ac- 
tion. The joyous affirmative of youth may return 
to a man in the calm affirmative of age, but the 
dreary period of negation which often intervenes 
shows the man in his uselessness. The sphere of 
one's faith may be restricted, he may not believe 
many things, and his moral convictions may centre 
around a few objects; but some positive affirma- 
tion of moral and spiritual power there must be if 
one is to realize any supreme and commanding 
use of his nature. If for any reason the strength 
of one's manhood has been lost in negation, there 
may be a splendid recovery in the affirmative of 



188 PERSONAL POWER 

age, but this means a recovery of personal power, 
not its cumulative result. 

Consider, again, the effect upon a man's use- 
fulness, the right use of himself, of the spirit 
of compromise with evil. I suppose that there 
is nothing which weakens the consciousness of 
moral power so easily, or so certainly, as the 
spirit of compromise. I doubt if the overt act, 
which may be acknowledged and forgiven, pro- 
duces so weakening an effect upon character. The 
spirit of compromise with evil is the spirit of 
cowardice. Nothing is more demoralizing to any 
of us than even the suspicion of the lack of 
moral courage. We thereby lose confidence in 
ourselves, and self-respect. Suppose, then, that 
the spirit of compromise has created a certain 
habit of business, or of social life, or even of 
opinion and belief, how can we have that esti- 
mation of ourselves which will enable us to ful- 
fill any first use of our lives? And here again 
how can any of us hope to recover the sense of 
personal power thus lost, except through repent- 
ance on our part, and forgiveness on the part of 
God? 

And yet again, consider the effect upon a man's 
usefulness, the available as well as the full and 
right use of himself, of the outside sin. By the 
outside sin I do not mean the open or exposed 



SECOND USES OF MEN 189 

sin. I mean the sin which lies as it were outside 
the sphere of his work. His work, it may be, 
calls especially for honesty, and the man is hon- 
est. He has never defrauded a fellow man. But 
he has his own vice, or, as we are wont to say, 
his own weakness, affecting him and not others, 
perhaps known only to himself. And yet this 
knowledge of it, except as it rouses in him a de- 
termined spirit of conflict, robs him of the sense 
of persona] power. A known moral inconsist- 
ency, except, I repeat, as it rouses the soul to 
continuous battle, is fatal to any great useful- 
ness. It is not easy to say just the right word at 
this point. I think that the man who has to fight 
the hardest to save himself may be the most 
helpful under certain circumstances to others. I 
think that the battle with any passion, whether 
of the body or of the mind, is an ennobling pro- 
cess. It may go on unceasingly in those who are 
fulfilling God's first uses for them. But if for 
any reason the battle has been given over, and 
the consciousness of sin has taken the place of 
the sense of conflict, then nothing remains but 
to set about the recovery of personal power 
through the selfsame way of repentance and 
forgiveness. 

Now in what I have been saying as to the 
causes of those moral lapses in men which affect 



190 PERSONAL POWER 

their personal power and change the order if not 
the grade of their uses, I have not spoken of any 
of the gross or violent ways in which men dis- 
possess themselves of their birthright. In other 
words, I have not had in mind the exceptional 
man with his exceptional sins, but the average 
man with his moral liabilities. " For all," as St. 
Paul says in his far-reaching words, " fall short 
of the glory of God." In this sense we all miss 
the mark of our high calling. But the distinc- 
tion is clear, both to experience and to observa- 
tion, between the man who through faith, and 
spiritual industry, and moral struggle maintains 
and develops his personal power, and the man 
who through the neglect of these saving quali- 
ties lets his personal power slip away from him. 
In the latter case there must be a process of 
recovery, and it is usually a twofold process, 
involving the recovery of the man to himself, 
and the recovery of the man to his uses. In this 
process God and the man himself work together, 
the man through repentance and faith, and God 
through forgiveness and help. It is a patient 
work. As Charles Kingsley wrote to Thomas 
Cooper, the Chartist, on his way to Christianity: 
" Be patient with God. Has He not had patience 
with you ? And therefore have patience with all 
men and with all things, and then you will rise 



SECOND USES OF MEN 191 

again in due time the stouter for your long bat- 
tle." If we have the right to presume that God 
has first uses for men which He would see accom- 
plished in their lives, we have far more than any 
presumption to go upon in respect to the recov- 
ery of men to second uses. The simple, homely 
truth taught by the object lesson before us is the 
prelude to the teaching of the gospels. The re- 
covery of men to themselves and to their uses, — 
this is Christianity. "I came not," said Jesus, 
" to call the righteous but sinners to repentance." 
"I say unto you that there shall be joy in 
heaven over one sinner that repenteth more than 
over ninety and nine just persons, which need no 
repentance." Christ is not here speaking in the 
language of definition, or dealing in proportions. 
He is trying to persuade the longing and yet re- 
luctant heart of humanity to believe, not in the 
possibility, but in the certainty of God's concern, 
and of his delight in the work of recovery. The 
righteous man, like the elder son in the parable, 
may sometimes have his doubts and questionings 
about what God may think of him; but the sin- 
ner, like the prodigal, can have no doubt about 
what God thinks of him, or would do for him. 

Let the assurance of this truth which lies at 
the heart of Christianity have its fit place in your 
working faith. Put it where you can reach it as 



192 PERSONAL POWER 

against some possible time of need. Accept it in 
all which it means and in all which it implies. 
Never rest content with the forgiveness of God 
when your " sins are covered/' but go on to the 
recovery of personal power. Forgiveness is a 
means to an end, namely, the reinstatement of 
your life in its uses. If you have wasted time, 
redeem it. If your life has gone out into mere 
negation, let it close in some clear affirmation of 
truth. If you have compromised with evil, and 
men have known your habits, be not afraid or 
ashamed of the inconsistency of standing forth 
for righteousness. And if you have sinned to the 
conscious hurt of your soul, give your conscience, 
" purged of evil works " or of evil thoughts, the 
chance to approve of your now free and unhin- 
dered work for men and for God. As there can 
be no loss so great to any man as the loss of 
personal power, so there can be no recovery so 
great to any man as the recovery of personal 
power. 



THE MORAL TRAINING OF THE 
COLLEGE MAN 

ADDRESSES AT THE OPENING OF SUCCESSIVE 
COLLEGE TEAKS, 1905-1908 



THE TRAINING OF THE GENTLEMAN 

ADDRESS AT THE OPENING OF THE COLLEGE 
YEAR, 1905-1906 

I wish to speak to you, as you are now entering 
or returning to college, upon a somewhat un- 
usual academic theme, namely, the Part which 
our Colleges must henceforth be expected to take 
in the Training of the Gentleman. 

The presentation of this subject does not im- 
ply that our colleges have not heretofore trained 
gentlemen. That has been one of their assumed 
functions. Neither does it imply that men do not 
enter college as gentlemen. 

I introduce this subject because of certain con- 
ditions which are beginning to manifest them- 
selves within our colleges, which are making the 
training, or, if you please, the practice of a gen- 
tleman, more difficult. Men who enter the col- 
leges are seen to be of three types, when measured 
by their ruling ambitions and tastes. We still 
have men possessed of the high passion for 
scholarship, whether that passion be expressed 
in the older delights of culture, or in the newer 
joy of research. I should not like to believe that 



196 PERSONAL POWER 

the mind of our American youth had ceased to 
respond at the very first chance, or continuously, 
to the great subject-matter of scholarship, — the 
experiences and the aspirations of men as re- 
corded in the literatures of the world, or their 
reasonings as stimulated by scientific discovery. 
My faith in the survival of the passion of scholar- 
ship in the midst of the intellectual temptations 
of modern life is sustained by facts. The scholar 
still lives in our colleges. He is here, he is every- 
where, though his tribe is small. 

Of course the prevailing type of mind in the 
colleges is set towards affairs. It is well that 
it is so. If the exclusive or chief product of the 
colleges was the scholar, we should soon cease 
to have scholarship. We should have in its 
place pedantry. It is the intellectual competi- 
tion from the world of affairs which keeps the 
modern scholar alive. The proportion of the 
scholar to the pedant was never so high as it is 
to-day. 

An incoming type of the college man, seen in 
increasing numbers, represents in one form or 
another the social aspects of college life. The large 
increase of this class is due to two causes : first, 
to the long prosperity of the country which not 
only enables many more families than formerly 
to send their sons to college, but which also 



THE TRAINING OF THE GENTLEMAN 197 

awakens in them corresponding social ambitions ; 
and second, to the greatly increased attractive- 
ness of college life itself. The college man of 
this type is not necessarily aimless, but he is not 
usually possessed of the tastes of the scholar, or 
of the ambitions of the man of affairs. What he 
wants is college life, not college work. Now the 
organization of a part of college life around the 
idea of leisure rather than of work may seem to 
be helpful in the training of the gentleman. And 
so it is. The danger comes in, as I shall show 
you, when the right proportion in the allotment 
of time is violated, or when without any refer- 
ence to time the whole interest in a man's thought 
and desire goes one way. 

One condition then, which is comparatively 
new to American colleges, greatly affecting their 
office in the training of the gentleman, is the or- 
ganization of leisure to the degree of very marked 
encroachment upon work. The other condition, 
also comparatively new, and affecting still more 
the work of training the gentleman, is the ex- 
posure of college life so completely to the meth- 
ods and standards of the outer world set toward 
commercial success, a condition which needs no 
explanation until I come to apply it to our situa- 
tion. 

Let me now tell you with the utmost definite- 



198 PERSONAL POWER 

ness and frankness what I think that we must do 
to fulfill our part in the training of gentlemen. 
There are certain essentials in the making of a 
gentleman which underlie all the social conven- 
tionalities and give the reason for their existence. 
We must bear in mind that we have to do with 
men who are to declare the habit of their lives 
chiefly through their relation to the traditions 
and customs and social estimates of their own 
country. A gentleman is of course a gentleman 
the world around, but the conditions under which 
he is produced vary from nation to nation, as 
they vary from age to age. 

The first essential which must be insisted upon 
by the colleges in the training of the gentleman 
is efficiency, not because it is the finest thing, 
but because it is fundamental. The social order 
with which you will have to do, and according to 
which you will be estimated, is organized around 
work rather than around leisure. This distinc- 
tion, however, may be more apparent than real. 
The social order in many of the older countries 
which is marked by the absence of those com- 
pelling callings, which we call work, has its own 
duties and responsibilities which allow very little 
of actual leisure. The boy of rank is born into 
a well-ordered life. The routine of the household, 
so far as it affects him, is exacting. And when 



THE TRAINING OF THE GENTLEMAN 199 

he reaches the earliest approaches to maturity he 
is set at tasks, or placed in positions, which test 
him. An American family of fortune is more 
apt to produce untrained, if not uneducated, and 
irresponsible sons, than is an English family of 
rank. I take the liberty of reading an extract 
from a recent letter from Lord Dartmouth, which 
gives without the slightest intention a glimpse 
into the responsible activities of a well-trained 
English family. " It may be of interest to you to 
know," he says, " that my youngest son is now 
a Middy on H. M. S. King Edward VII, which 
helped to entertain the French Fleet at Brest ; 
that my second son is on the point of starting for 
Central Africa, under the auspices of the British 
Museum, on a tour of collection and exploration ; 
and that the oldest is the accepted candidate on 
the tariff reform platform, at the next general 
election for West Bromwich. He has made an 
excellent start, though it is very doubtful if he 
will be returned. The opposition in the con- 
stituency claim to be absolutely certain that he 
won't, but at any rate he will put up a good 
fight." 

This is the record of three sons of an English 
house in their present training for some form of 
public service, the oldest not much beyond his 
majority. That there are idlers and profligates 



200 PERSONAL POWER 

among young men of rank is well understood, but 
they are very costly. The great houses cannot long 
sustain themselves except through virile and well- 
trained sons. 

The whole trend of the better American life is 
against inefficiency. The shirk can never be rated 
among us as a gentleman. The colleges, there- 
fore, of this country are expected to see to it that 
the men whom they turn out year by year satisfy 
the national demand, the social as well as the busi- 
ness demand, for efficiency. The chief way of meet- 
ing this demand must be through the spirit which 
obtains in our colleges, in which all who are con- 
cerned must have a part. The administration of 
a college must be in itself efficient, the teaching 
must be stimulating as well as accurate, and the 
public sentiment of the college must be intolerant 
of the shirk. But the spirit of the college must 
be measured by its standards, and these in turn 
must be maintained in part by its rules. Kules are 
for those who are relatively indifferent to the spirit 
of a college, probably at any given time not more 
than one fourth of its membership, but a very 
controlling part, if not held to the college stand- 
ards. 

In the enrollment for the present year it will 
appear that six men in the last Junior class fail 
to make Senior standing ; that twenty men in the 



THE TRAINING OF THE GENTLEMAN 201 

last Sophomore class fail to make Junior stand- 
ing ; and that twenty-one men in the last Fresh- 
man class fail to make Sophomore standing, — 
fifty men in all who cannot be advanced to their 
natural place. There are in some cases entirely 
sufficient and honorable reasons why men who are 
due to enter a succeeding class should not enter 
it, but the above result shows a disregard of one 
element of efficiency, namely, the doing of one's 
work in time. To arrest this tendency, a new rule 
will go into operation the present year to this 
effect : — 

" The number of hours upon which the standing 
of a student for any semester shall be computed 
shall not be less than the minimum number of 
hours required for that semester." 

Any student, that is, who sees fit to absent him- 
self from a course which he thinks that he cannot 
make without too much effort will have his failure 
in that course charged to his account in his gen- 
eral average at the end of the semester. It will be 
seen that it is much better for one to have a par- 
tial failure, say of thirty or forty, reckoned into 
his average, than a total failure at zero, a rating 
which will affect particularly those who are on 
scholarships, or those whose general standing is 
insecure. I will also state that it is very doubtful 
if the Summer School will be open hereafter to 



202 PERSONAL POWER 

deficients, at least to those whose deficiencies are 
due to absences from recitations. 

These announcements are made in the interest 
of those who endanger their own efficiency, and 
the efficiency of the college, through their post- 
ponement of work. The order of the modern 
world in which you will soon take your places 
does not recognize the gentleman of leisure, if 
by that term is meant the man who shirks a pre- 
sent and common duty to gratify a present and 
personal mood. To ask other men to wait upon 
his moods is more than a gentleman ought to 
ask. Respect for time is a necessary element in 
the training of the modern gentleman, because 
that involves in so large a degree the element 
of consideration for others. 

But efficiency does not make a gentleman. 
There are a great many efficient men who are 
very far from being gentlemen. Judged by this 
test alone, there is no distinction between hon- 
orable and questionable successes. What may 
the efficient man lack among the essentials of 
a gentleman? He may lack honor. He has 
force, it may be in abundance. His power may 
be without quality. Power is refined by the 
sense of honor. How shall we define honor ? Let 
us turn to that master of the higher ethics — 
Wordsworth. 



THE TRAINING OF THE GENTLEMAN 203 

" Say what is honor ? 'T is the finest sense 
Of justice which the human mind can frame, 
Intent each lurking frailty to disclaim, 
And guard the way of life from all offense, suffered or done." 

Or let us take the statement of those whose art 
is that of careful discrimination, who say of 
honor that " it is the nice sense of what is right, 
just, and true, with course of life corresponding 
thereto : a strict conformity to the duty imposed 
by conscience, by position, or by privilege." 

Honor then as you see is made up largely of 
personal sensitiveness. Poet and lexicographer 
are agreed in calling it a sense. It indicates not 
so much what a man thinks about a thing, as 
how he feels about it in all his nature. It can 
be defined only in personal terms. You can fix 
the standard of honesty, — above such a line a 
man is honest, below it he is dishonest. You can- 
not draw the line of generosity, above which a 
man acts nobly, below which he is mean. Much 
less can you fix the standard of honor. It is in 
the man himself. Hence the training toward 
honor is a training first toward sensitiveness to 
what is just, right, and true, and then a training 
of the will to enforce this finer sense in action. 

Let us apply this principle to college life. The 
supreme test of honor is no longer to be found 
in what is known as the " honor system." For 



204 PERSONAL POWER 

various reasons the stress of temptation does not 
now fall upon honesty in examinations. The ex- 
amination system has become really a part of the 
college curriculum. It has ceased, that is, to be 
an outside game between professor and student. 
Competition among scholars no longer leads one 
man to take unfair advantage of another. And 
college sentiment is steadily at work upon the 
individual student toward honesty. The increas- 
ing effect from class to class is very perceptible. 
By the time of graduation there is scarcely a man 
who would not scorn to cheat in examination. 
The penalty at this point, which is capital punish- 
ment, must remain till every vestige of dishonesty 
is removed ; but there has been a steady and rapid 
decline in this form of college dishonor. 

For the most practical tests of honor we must 
turn from college work to college sport. The law 
of temptation, gentlemen, is very simple. Temp- 
tation follows the life. Wherever the life centres, 
there temptation does its strongest work. Now 
college life is at present more intense, more con- 
gested, more subject to the irresponsibilities of 
excitement, on the field of sport than anywhere 
else. And this holds true not merely during the 
progress of a game, but at every point in those 
organized activities which represent competitive 
athletics. I do not propose to enumerate the 



THE TRAINING OF THE GENTLEMAN 205 

various points in these organized activities at 
which college honor is liable to suffer, partly be- 
cause I do not wish to give a disproportionate 
place to this phase of my subject, but chiefly 
because I believe that the organization of athletics 
has tended more and more to the purification of 
athletics. Through the persistent work of athletic 
committees, and of many captains and managers, 
and of many coaches, a great many dishonorable 
practices and methods have been organized out 
of the system. In fact so much has been accom- 
plished through organization, and through the 
publicity attending organized methods, that it has 
now become possible to take the appeal in behalf 
of college honor in sport distinctly to two parties 
which have not heretofore been sufficiently in evi- 
dence. It has now become possible to appeal as 
never before to the second thought of the whole 
student body of a college. Heretofore, a college 
has virtually said to the athlete, " You win the 
game, we will do the rest." But the intelligent 
men of a college no longer stake their interest on 
the fortune of a game. They wait the verdict of 
the season. That verdict is the verdict of experts, 
which takes less and less account of mere victories 
and more and more account of those athletic 
values in men and in teams which represent hon- 
est training and honest work. 



206 PERSONAL POWER 

And it has now become possible to take the 
appeal more directly to the honor of the athlete 
himself. There is the place where in the last 
resort it must fall — upon his sense of honor. 
It is right to demand and to expect the growth 
of honor in the college athlete. You recall one 
of the more practical definitions of honor which 
I quoted, — " conformity, in conduct to one's 
position or privilege." 

The college athlete has reached an exacting 
position or privilege, more exacting than he is 
probably aware of. He has become, in college sen- 
timent and in that outside sentiment which a col- 
lege controls, the representative college man. He 
has for the time being displaced the scholar, 
the debater, and all other traditional representa- 
tives. Such a position must be to him its own 
sufficient reward, else he will forfeit his right to 
it. The moment that a college athlete asks for 
other rewards than high honor from his fellows, 
that moment he ceases to be worthy of their 
honor. 

The whole argument against the denial of the 
right of the college athlete to outside earnings be- 
cause of its assumed discrimination against poor 
men, has always seemed to me utterly irrelevant. 
Any man is at liberty to earn money through his 
athletic abilities. It is an entirely honorable way 



THE TRAINING OF THE GENTLEMAN 207 

of earning money. But when a man becomes a 
college athlete he makes his choice between honor 
and money as his reward, and if he chooses honor, 
his own sense of honor ought to hold him to his 
choice. 

I have been speaking of college life as reach- 
ing its greatest intensity in athletics. But side by 
side with this intensity, there is to be noted a dif- 
fusion of college life over many and various in- 
terests which exposes it to the ordinary temptations 
of the outer world. A college does so much busi- 
ness, that the men who carry it on are constantly 
exposed to what are falsely termed "business 
methods." They have the opportunity, and are 
often solicited to make private gain out of the 
occasions for rendering public service to organi- 
zations, classes, or the college. Personal initiative, 
enterprise, management have their proper rewards 
in college as elsewhere. There are services which 
ought to be paid for. It is not improper to seek 
openly positions which allow these services, pro- 
vided one is competent to fill them. But in all 
such cases there should be the strictest regard to 
accurate and responsible expenditures of money. 
I urge upon every class the necessity of a care- 
ful record of all its business meetings. Make the 
class secretaryship the most responsible position 
in the class, both in college and afterwards. And 



208 PERSONAL POWER 

in all organizations, which represent private en- 
terprise, but which have to do with the college 
name or the college reputation, see to it that there 
is a clear rendering of accounts to all parties con- 
cerned. I deplore the slightest tendency on the 
part of college men to utilize public service for 
private gain. The most despicable word which 
has crept into current speech is the word " graft." 
Let it not be so much as named in the college 
world. If a man's honor is not quick at this point, 
his college has everything to fear from him, and 
nothing to hope for from him in the future. 

The efficient man, if he be possessed of honor, 
must be essentially a gentleman. Of that there 
can be no doubt. But I think that the term allows 
something more. Honor does not quite express 
that unselfishness of character and of action which 
we like to ascribe to a gentleman. I should add, 
therefore, to efficiency and honor, devotion, that 
outgoing and saving force which is needed to sat- 
isfy our conception of a gentleman in the full ca- 
pacity of his life or in its most generous action. 
Honor is not a negative force, far from it. But 
it is largely a restraining force. It keeps one back 
from injustice, untruth, and wrongdoing toward 
others. And it may be a quick and mighty in- 
centive to brave and generous action. But honor 
has never been quite a sufficient power, as we 



THE TRAINING OF THE GENTLEMAN 209 

measure the great, saving powers of the world. 
It gave us the many gains of the age of chivalry, 
but it did not fight the battles of modern freedom, 
nor found the modern state or church. It gave 
us the crusader, but not the missionary. We some- 
how feel that we must have the man to-day, and 
surely he ought to be a gentleman, who can teach 
us how to rule our cities, how to control and guide 
our corporate wealth, how to rescue society from 
its hard and selfish weariness. And in so far as 
we have men of this type in society, in control of 
corporate power, ruling over cities, at the head of 
the nation, we feel that we have in them more than 
efficiency, more than honor. We are conscious of 
a devotion on their part, inspiring in its unselfish- 
ness, which we should not wish to leave out of 
our ideal of manhood. Our gentleman cannot be 
an insufficient man, and selfishness is the great 
insufficiency. 

In this talk about the part which the college 
may take in the training of a gentleman, I have 
not dwelt, as you have noticed, upon forms or 
conventionalities. Every gentleman respects form, 
Respect for form can be taught or at least incul- 
cated, but not form itself. One comes to be at 
ease in society by going into society. Manners 
come by observation. We imitate, we follow the 
better fashion of society, the better behavior of 



210 PERSONAL POWER 

men. Good breeding consists first in the attention 
of others in our behalf to certain necessary de- 
tails, then in our attention to them. We come in 
time to draw close and nice distinctions. This 
little thing is right, that is not quite right. So 
we grow into the formal habits of a gentleman. 
" Good manners are made up of constant and petty 
sacrifices," says Emerson. It is well to keep this 
saying in mind as a qualification of another of 
his more familiar sayings : " Give me a thought, 
and my hands and legs and voice and face will 
all go right. It is only when mind and character 
slumber that the dress can be seen." 

I like to see the well-bred man, to whom the 
details of social life have become a second nature. 
I like also to see the play of that first healthy in- 
stinct in a true man which scorns a mean act, 
which will not allow him to take part in the mak- 
ing of a mean custom, which for example, if he 
be a college fellow, will not suffer him to treat 
another fellow as a fag. I am entirely sure that 
that man is a gentleman. 

So then it is, in this world of books, of com- 
panionship, of sport, of struggle with some of us, 
of temptation also, and yet more of high incen- 
tives, we are all set to the task of coming out, 
and of helping one another to come out, as 
gentlemen. Do not miss, I beseech you, the great- 



THE TRAINING OF THE GENTLEMAN 211 

ness of the task. Do not miss its constancy. It is 
more than the incidental work of a college to train 
the efficient, the honorable, the unselfish man. A 
college-bred man must be able to show at all times 
and on all occasions the quality of his distinction. 



II 

THE TRAINING OF THE SCHOLAR 

ADDRESS AT THE OPENING OF THE COLLEGE 
YEAR, 1906-1907 

As we came together last year I discussed the 
social aspect of college life, emphasizing the part 
which our colleges and universities are expected 
to take in the training of the gentleman. Running 
through all routine and technical work of an aca- 
demic sort there are certain clear purposes which 
issue in personal results, the outcome of which 
can be expressed only in personal terms. The col- 
lege man must be imbued with the spirit of the 
gentleman, he must be imbued with the spirit of 
scholarship, and he must be imbued with the spirit 
of citizenship. The claim of manners to a com- 
manding place in the college world is as old as 
any academic foundation. The claim of citizen- 
ship is more modern, but it is steadily growing 
clearer and more exacting. The claim of scholar- 
ship inheres in the original and abiding intention 
of the college. Not that our colleges may be ex- 
pected to produce scholars in the same proportion 
and to the same degree in which they may be ex- 
pected to produce gentlemen and citizens, but cer- 



THE TRAINING OF THE SCHOLAR 213 

tainly it is a reasonable expectation that every 
college man is capable of being imbued to a 
certain extent with the spirit of scholarship. 
Otherwise a man is out of place in college. It 
is no advantage, as it is no credit to him, to be 
there. 

I ask, therefore, — it is the point of departure 
for my address, — Are the colleges of to-day suffi- 
ciently honoring the claims of scholarship ? I ask 
this question as applicable equally to faculties and 
students. 

It is applicable to faculties because we usually 
get from our students what we persistently ask 
for, provide for, and expect. The administrative 
policies which characterize the modern college 
are apparently contradictory in their effect upon 
scholarship. On the one hand, the college has 
been opened to competing objects of ambition. 
Other standards of excellence than those deter- 
mined by scholarship have been introduced and 
acknowledged. A generation ago a student could 
hardly satisfy his ambition except through rank 
in his class. To-day he finds satisfaction in excel- 
lence in athletics, or through the acquirement of 
leadership in some one of the various activities of 
college life. The principle of competition is at 
work more effectively without the class-room than 
within. 



214 PERSONAL POWER 

On the other hand, the adoption of the elective 
system has been a stimulus to individual scholar- 
ship. It has made study more interesting. It has 
enabled a great many men to find themselves. It 
has introduced the element of individuality into 
college work. 

The modern college, then, is at a disadvantage 
in the matter of scholarship, when compared with 
its predecessor, in the fact that the principle of 
competition has been allowed to take effect else- 
where than in scholarship ; it has the advantage 
over its predecessor, in the matter of scholarship, 
in the fact that it places before students for per- 
sonal choice a wider, more varied, and more inter- 
esting curriculum. 

Just how these two tendencies balance in any 
given case it is impossible to say, but I think that 
a third tendency has come in, quite unnoticed, 
which operates against scholarship in our colleges, 
namely, the tendency to allow the absorption of 
the idea of scholarship by the graduate school. 

The result has been that the idea of work has 
been substituted for that of scholarship in our col- 
leges. Scholarship, meaning thereby the idea of 
genuine, interested, protracted study, has been 
postponed to the professional school. The scholar 
has become in our thinking a professional, just as 
much as a lawyer or a physician. We have ceased 



THE TRAINING OF THE SCHOLAR 215 

to expect scholarship until the circumstance allows 
the professionalized student, and have accepted 
in place of scholarship various gradations of work. 
I think that our colleges are suffering to-day from 
the want of respect, on the part of faculties, for 
amateur scholarship. I have referred to the gra- 
dations of work. The ranking system with us, as 
you know, divides men into classes according to 
the decimals between 50 and 100 : A 90-100, B 
80-90, C 70-80, D 60-70, E 50-60. 

This comparatively wide range of marking has 
been adopted because, in the language of one of 
the older members of the faculty, fifty points is 
none too much to express the difference between 
the maximum and minimum working of minds, the 
lowest of which is entitled to college recognition. 
But I have often thought that the formal result 
of this system is to increase the number on the 
lower ranges and to diminish the number on the 
higher range. This is on the assumption that 
marking is relative rather than absolute. 

However this may be, about 54 per cent of the 
College during the first semester of last year was 
on the three upper grades and 46 per cent on the 
two lower grades, though 16 per cent only was on 
the lowest grade. Classes vary in scholarship, but 
the rule is that scholarship, as judged by the rank- 
ing systems, advances rapidly in junior and senior 



216 PERSONAL POWER 

years. Thus in the record of the last year referred 
to, 12 per cent of the Senior class ranked A, 22 
per cent B, 35 per cent C, 21 per cent D, and 10 
per cent E. 

It is evident that only the lowest grade repre- 
sents what may be termed enforced scholarship. 
It is this grade which is the chief concern, so far 
as discipline is a matter of scholarship, of the 
committee on administration. Above this grade 
everything depends upon the spirit of scholarship. 
And for the development of this spirit a faculty 
has three means of influence : first, the proper ad- 
justment of college activities — including college 
sports — to college work; second, the arrange- 
ment of the curriculum and of individual courses 
with the view to the greatest intellectual stimu- 
lus ; and third, personal inspiration, of which the 
chief factor at present consists, as I believe, in the 
belief and expectation that the scholar can live 
and grow in the atmosphere of the college. The 
spirit of scholarship is not the spirit of celibacy, 
though the scholar committed to a given task may 
work to best advantage in the detached life of the 
graduate school. 

Turning now to the attitude of undergraduate 
students toward the question before us, we nat- 
urally find a corresponding disposition to restrict 
the sphere of scholarship. The scholar, according 



THE TRAINING OF THE SCHOLAR 217 

to college sentiment, may be the man of brilliant 
parts, the man distinctly of mind ; but he is for 
the most part reckoned as the unsocial man, the 
man most out of sympathy with the temper of 
college life and activities. Of the actual men 
whom you may designate as scholars I can have 
nothing to say, but in what I may further say to 
you I want to try to change your interpretation 
of the spirit of scholarship. For, if it is rightly 
understood, I believe that all college men will 
have the sense to appreciate it at its true value, 
and that many who are now indifferent to its 
claims will have the sense to avail themselves of 
its incentives. 

The greatest thing which can be said, and 
which is always to be said, about the spirit of 
scholarship is that it inculcates and develops the 
love of truth. This is peculiarly the significance 
of modern scholarship. The scholarship of to-day 
is not measured by the amount of one's learning 
but by the truthfulness of his knowledge. We are 
living under the aphorism of one of our late 
humorists, — " It is better not to know so much, 
than to know so many things that are not so." 
The first process in scholarship is to divest ac- 
credited knowledge of all assumptions, and uncer- 
tainties, and unrealities of any kind. So that if 
the process stops at this point it has created in 



218 PERSONAL POWER 

the scholar a habit of mind of immense value. 
If you enter any of the professions with this 
habit of mind, law, medicine, teaching, the minis- 
try, or any one of the great businesses, you can- 
not allow any sham, or sophistry, or other kind 
of untruth, without a sharp mental protest. You 
tolerate any of these things at a mental cost 
which the untrained mind does not have to pay. 
This is the negative work of the spirit of schol- 
arship. On the positive side it opens new fields 
of vision, a vast territory of thought and of action 
otherwise inaccessible. The truth-loving mind is 
more apt to be endowed with insight, invention, 
and initiative, than any other kind of mind. When 
once it enters upon its stimulating and exhila- 
rating action it reacts upon the whole nature. I 
have seen men in college over and over again 
caught by the spirit of investigation in one of 
the natural or physical sciences, and thereby 
diverted if not converted from wasteful and de- 
moralizing habits already formed. And as I have 
followed these particular men into their after 
work in no case have I seen a moral relapse. The 
spirit of scholarship is in its highest intent the 
spirit of truth, and therefore shares in degree the 
great prerogative of truth, — "The truth shall 
make you free." 

After we have said that the spirit of scholar- 



THE TRAINING OF THE SCHOLAR 219 

ship develops the love of truth, we may say that it 
is largely concerned with the training for power. 
The powerful men of to-day are of two types, men 
of will, and men of trained minds. Neither type 
is complete in itself. Will-power unrelieved, or in 
excess, gives the overreaching or otherwise blun- 
dering man. Mental power unsupported often 
lacks initiative or endurance. But the trained 
mind represents, on the whole, better than any 
other one thing, the present standard of power. It 
is, after all, the scholar in the broad sense of the 
term, the man who has learned how to investigate, 
to analyze, to reason, to invent, to anticipate, who 
is most in demand in the business world. A good 
address, activity, industry will carry a man pretty 
well along on the road to success, but if these be 
all, there comes a place at which he stops, and 
men of the training I have described go by him. 
I am not saying that some very indifferent schol- 
ars in college may not become successful in busi- 
ness or in the professions. What I am saying is 
that if they are genuinely successful, it is usually 
through having afterwards learned to use their 
minds in practically the same way in which they 
might have learned to use them while in college. 
The tasks are different, the problems are differ- 
ent, but the kind of mind called for is the same. 
Success of the highest sort in business means 



220 PERSONAL POWER 

scholarship in business. There are no substitutes 
for it. The man who shirks it simply condemns 
himself to those grades where men are striving 
together in that kind of physical activity which 
the street calls " hustling." 

I carry my thought a little farther, and still 
more into the region of personal results, when I 
say to you that the spirit of scholarship is becom- 
ing more and more necessary for teaching men 
how to gratify their tastes properly through the 
use of money. If there is any class of students 
who for personal reasons ought to acquire the 
spirit of scholarship it is those who propose to 
make money. You who propose to do this, if you 
succeed, will be met after a little by the question, 
How will you spend it ? The question does not 
now seem to you to be of very serious account. 
It may prove to be the most serious question of 
a personal sort which you will have to answer. 
The most lamentable sight now before us is that 
of the great multitude of persons of easy wealth, 
who do not care to use their money for others, 
and who do not know how to spend it rationally 
on themselves. Most of the money which is now 
being spent in personal ways goes for show or 
for amusement. The spectacle has ceased to be 
attractive. I think that the stronger and clearer 
minded young men of the country are beginning 



THE TRAINING OF THE SCHOLAR 221 

to turn away from it. But if you had the money 
of these persons whom you no longer envy, and 
their tastes, what would you, or what could you, 
better do with the money ? Do you not see that 
the question is really a question of desires and 
tastes? Do you not see how helpless a man is 
who is rich in money, but poor in imagination 
and taste? 

To the man, therefore, who proposes to make 
money, assuming that for one reason or another 
this is the motive underlying the transition from 
the old professions to business, the question as to 
how he shall spend so much of it as he can rightly 
spend upon himself or his family is of supreme 
importance. It must be anticipated. It cannot be 
satisfactorily answered through the mental pow- 
ers and habits which have been used in the making 
of money. The right, or fit, or enjoyable spending 
of money calls for entirely different qualities from 
those required for gaining it. The college man 
who has trained himself to become a great earn- 
ing force, but who has not trained those powers 
which at the proper time will teach him how to 
spend his earnings, is simply preparing himself 
for the fate of those whom he now sees and 
pities. 

I enjoin most earnestly upon all of you who 
propose for yourselves a business career that you 



222 PERSONAL POWER 

acquire now and at any cost the spirit of scholar- 
ship, for two reasons, — first, because your time 
for study is limited when compared with the time 
of those who go over into professional studies; 
and secondly, because you will have in all proba- 
bility the means of gratifying those tastes which 
the spirit of scholarship can create. Some of you 
will have access to the world of beauty in nature 
and in art. Some of you will be able to possess, 
not merely to own, but to possess the things which 
men value according to their intelligence and 
taste. Some of you will have the opportunity to 
use wealth for personal culture as well as for 
personal enjoyment. 

Will you ignore these opportunities because you 
are not prepared to take them, and therefore give 
your time, your money, yourselves, to restless ac- 
tivities or cheap amusements ? Or will you take 
these opportunities because you have prepared 
yourselves to take them through the training of 
your finer senses ? The question, as it now con- 
fronts you, is really a question of scholarship. 
The spirit of scholarship becomes, when so di- 
rected, the spirit of the finer sensibilities and 
tastes. It is the spirit of discrimination. It teaches 
the difference between the coarse and the fine, 
just as it teaches the difference between the true 
and the false. 



THE TRAINING OF THE SCHOLAR 223 

I do not claim that the spirit of scholarship is 
the deepest thing which appeals to our better 
nature, — there is a stronger and a deeper call 
which leads us straight to service and to sacrifice. 
Of that I can speak more fitly at other times. 
To-day I set forth the claims of the spirit of 
scholarship and its appeal to you. I want to make 
the perspective of college life clear to you, to 
some of you at the start, to some of you who have 
not yet really found it, or are not yet ordering 
your lives according to it. Do not mistake the 
incidents of college life for the substance of it. 
The incidents are full of color. They show for 
more than the plain substance. But not one, nor 
all of them would have given us this college, 
or any college. Colleges are established and en- 
dowed and administered to give to each incoming 
generation access to the mind of the world. Inci- 
dentally they stand for free and generous com- 
panionship, for healthful activities, for honorable 
sport. But the end of it all, near at hand and far 
beyond, is the knowledge and valuation of those 
things which have made out of this world " the 
habitable earth," the fitting home for the sons of 
men. What are these things ? Truth, and again 
truth, and power, and beauty. In these things, 
and in the still deeper joy of service and sacrifice, 
lies the desirable and attainable good of the 



224 PERSONAL POWER 

world. Do not let the pleasures of the way detain 
you too much, nor divert you too far, so that you 
fail to reach the acknowledged and chosen end 
for which you have set your feet in this ancient 
pathway. 



Ill 

THE TRAINING OF THE CITIZEN 

ADDRESS AT THE OPENING OF THE COLLEGE 
YEAR, 1907-1908 

In the opening address of this year I continue 
the course of thought which I began two years 
ago, designed to emphasize the distinctive objects 
of college training. At that time I discussed the 
more personal bearing of college training, espe- 
cially through its social influences, calling your 
attention to the increasing obligation, as it seemed 
to me, of our colleges to train men to become 
gentlemen. Last year I discussed the question — 
Are the colleges of to-day sufficiently honoring 
the claims of pure scholarship ? I am now to speak 
of the relation of the American college to citizen- 
ship. I may add that it had been in my thought 
to conclude this series by the consideration of the 
question — Are our colleges now producing under 
other forms the equivalent of that altruism, which, 
at the origin of the older colleges, found its im- 
mediate and most vivid expression in religious 
consecration? 

These four objects are, as I conceive, the ob- 
jects for which our colleges and universities exist, 



226 PERSONAL POWER 

— personal culture, scholarship set toward truth, 
some superior qualifications for citizenship, and 
the spirit of altruism in some compelling form. 
The first aim, personal culture, is our inheritance 
from the English colleges. The second, scholar- 
ship in the modern sense, is an importation from 
the German university. The third, some superior 
qualifications for citizenship, is from the necessity 
of our national life more distinctively American. 
The divorce of scholarship from politics is at once 
the strength and the weakness of the German 
university. The English colleges have furnished 
in large measure the statesmen of England and 
the rulers of India, but chiefly because of that 
restricted type of leadership characteristic of a 
democracy led by an aristocracy. The American 
college stands committed, alike through its free- 
dom of investigation and discussion, and through 
its early consecration to state and church, to the 
production of the superior qualifications for citi- 
zenship. This obligation to the state has always 
found a place among the best traditions of our 
historic colleges. What is relatively new is our 
gradual recognition and understanding of the 
fact, that in a pure democracy like our own there 
can be no progress and no security, unless every- 
thing within it which has productive power for 
good is disposed and prepared to contribute to 



THE TRAINING OF THE CITIZEN 227 

the public good according to its capacity and ac- 
cording to the relative value of its product. 

I must be brief in the discussion of this sub- 
ject, but, before I say more upon it, I wish to 
recall each of the two preceding subjects for a 
word of renewed application. 

The personal culture which marks the gentle- 
man is based on self-control. The greatest test 
of self-control in college life is found, as things 
are to-day, in connection with college sports. Are 
we gaining in our ability to meet this test ? To 
put the question bluntly, Can college men be 
counted upon to play without getting mad ? Can 
our colleges carry on intercollegiate contests 
without being obliged, from time to time, to sus- 
pend relations with one another? I do not recall 
an instance in the long rivalry between Oxford 
and Cambridge when it has been found neces- 
sary to suspend relations. It is relatively quite 
immaterial that we should spend time in im- 
proving the game, if we cannot, as we go on, 
improve the temper, the behavior, the spirit of 
fair play on the part of players and of their sup- 
porters. 

Still further and to the same point, are we 
holding our gains in the interest of amateur as 
opposed to professional athletics? Apparently the 
temptations to evasion, or deception, or to open 



228 PERSONAL POWER 

surrender to commercialism, in connection with 
baseball are too strong to be resisted. The aca- 
demic player has not been able to maintain his 
separateness, his distinctness from the professional 
player. More demoralization, in my judgment, 
has come into college life from the commercial 
seductions of baseball, than from all the liabil- 
ities of any sort inherent in or associated with 
football, the really great and genuine academic 
game. If this demoralization continues, I am 
prepared, as a lover and defender of college 
athletics, to advise the elimination of baseball, 
as an intercollegiate game, from college sports. I 
would confine academic games to games which 
have no outside market value, unless we can 
make the price we pay, and which we do pay 
most liberally, a sufficient reward, — namely, col- 
lege honor. 

Kecalling in like manner the subject of schol- 
arship, I ask, Are we gaining in the spirit of 
scholarship? The results of enforced scholarship 
show, I think, a commendable gain. Through 
the careful certification of schools as well as of 
students, through the consistent advance in the 
requirements for admission, through the refusal 
to admit special students, and more recently 
through the abolition of the makeup system and 
the second examination, the faculty has changed 



THE TRAINING OF THE CITIZEN 229 

very perceptibly the lower grades of scholarship. 
We have also gained somewhat in the results of 
stimulated scholarship, through the wiser use of the 
elective system, through the more suggestive and 
inviting arrangement of the curriculum, through 
the better adjustment of suitable courses to pro- 
fessional aims and methods, and especially through 
the growing freedom of intercourse between stu- 
dents and instructors. What we still lack in too 
large a degree is the free, courageous, exuberant 
spirit of scholarship. I should not like to be- 
lieve, I do not believe, that half the men who 
go to college here and elsewhere are not capable 
of realizing the joy of the intellectual life. But I 
should not be willing to affirm that half the men 
in any college in this country do realize that joy. 
The scholar will come to his own in college senti- 
ment when he shows the same zest and enthusi- 
asm which the born athlete shows for the game, 
provided he shows himself equally human, able to 
make full and ready contact with his fellows. 

Keturning to the subject immediately before us, 
I take up the third object of college training, 
training for citizenship. The college man, as I 
have said, ought to be the man of superior quali- 
fications for citizenship. What are the superior 
qualifications for citizenship ? I name first with- 
out hesitation, because always important but now 



230 PERSONAL POWER 

necessary, the willingness to subordinate private 
interest to the public good. Why should I speak 
of anything which has become a necessity as a 
superior qualification ? Because it is so rare. For 
generations the people of this country have been 
so rooted and grounded in individualism that al- 
most instinctively a man's first thought of him- 
self, in relation to the state, is as an individual, 
and then, if at all, as a citizen. In consequence, 
as the opportunity has presented itself in so many 
tempting forms, men have not hesitated, some 
thoughtlessly, others by all inventions and devices, 
to plunder the state, or the people through the 
state. We have become familiar with the process, 
— the inflated tariff, the improper franchise, the 
special and often corrupt legislation, anything to 
convert public utilities into private gain. It is often 
charged by the supporters of a given monopoly 
that any attack upon the system tends to suppress 
private enterprise. No sane man has any conten- 
tion with private enterprise except as it makes its 
gains at the public expense. It is the utter indif- 
ference of so many persons of power to the re- 
sponsibility of citizenship which is awakening the 
surprise and fear of careful observers at home 
and abroad. Foreign observers are discussing the 
effect upon the life of the nation from this decline 
in patriotism. One of the most recent of them 



THE TRAINING OF THE CITIZEN 231 

has written this ominous word — u America, the 
model of nations, on the downward path." It is 
not necessary for us to accept this judgment or 
even to sympathize with it, but we cannot learn 
too early or too eagerly how to associate patriot- 
ism with the subordination of private interest to 
the public good. This is everyday patriotism, the 
only kind which avails a nation in the long years. 
I therefore say to you that unless you are willing 
to plan your lives to meet the demand of this kind 
of patriotism, and to so plan them that you will 
be able to resist very great temptations, you will 
graduate without any claim whatever to this su- 
perior qualification for citizenship. 

A second superior qualification for citizenship 
lies in the ability to aid in the formation of public 
opinion. Public opinion is not the haphazard opin- 
ion of the many. It is made up in large degree of 
that moral sentiment which usually permeates the 
masses, but it can never accomplish even moral 
ends without an intelligent and well-defined pur- 
pose. No man can expect to contribute much to 
public opinion who is destitute of genuine moral 
sympathies ; neither can one contribute much who 
cannot help to interpret, to inform, to vitalize pub- 
lic sentiment. True, there are times when wise men 
hold their peace and leave the field to experts. 
The contrast between the issues which centred in 



232 PERSONAL POWER 

slavery and those which centre in the currency, 
or the tariff, or taxation, or any strictly economic 
question, is very marked. But soon or late every 
public question broadens into the wider ranges of 
discussion. Any one can see the broadening pro- 
cess which is now going on from the economic 
into the political. Just over and beyond the ques- 
tion of trusts, and tariffs, and transportation, there 
is emerging the far greater question of govern- 
mental authority, the supreme question of sover- 
eignty, — where does it reside, how is it to be dis- 
tributed, how enforced? Such questions as these 
inhere in the political responsibilities of citizen- 
ship. They cannot be " let out " to experts. In 
time they lead every man to the ballot box. 

It is partly in anticipation of the return of 
these fundamental political issues that the depart- 
ment of Political Science has been enlarged and 
strengthened. Certainly every college man should 
have the opportunity for some clear understand- 
ing of the prerogatives of government and of its 
limitations, with a view to informing and advis- 
ing his fellow citizens, as the proper occasion 
may arise, as well as for his own action. 

This particular illustration is but one showing 
the present opportunity for the exercise of some 
superior qualification for citizenship. In the mat- 
ter of forming public opinion the press may be 



THE TRAINING OF THE CITIZEN 233 

supposed to cover the field. Indirectly the press 
does cover the field. It gives us for the most 
part the facts on which we form our opinions 
on public questions. But directly its influence 
might be greater. We ought to have more organs 
of reflective opinion. I marvel at the sanity, and 
accuracy, and insight with which some of the 
editorial writers on our dailies judge the passing 
issue. Probably something would be lost in their 
case if you should attempt to change this practice 
of ready judgment. But the average daily has 
become, through the enterprise of the trade or 
through public demand, so largely a newspaper, 
that I believe we are now ready, in much larger 
numbers, for the weekly organ of editorial opin- 
ion and criticism, assuming, of course, that the 
man who takes more time to think will not think 
himself away into cynicism, or pessimism, or some 
other dehumanizing "ism." 

A third superior qualification for citizenship 
consists in the fixed purpose, which should acquire 
the force of a habit, to relate one's work, one's 
business or profession, to the public welfare. We 
have already carried the idea of patriotism beyond 
the sacrifices incident to war. We are growing 
familiar with the extension of the idea to the dis- 
charge of all civic duties of an official sort. Gov- 
ernor Hughes has given impressive utterance to 



234 PERSONAL POWER 

this enlarged view in the sentiment that the flag 
which floats over the offices of the government 
declares the same obligation with that which 
floats over the field of battle. Gradually the idea 
is being extended further still. Dr. Ray Lankester, 
president of the British Association for the Ad- 
vancement of Science, in a recent address protests 
against the restriction of the idea of patriotism 
to the work of soldiers, statesmen, rulers, or any 
so-called public men, affirming that it covers 
equally the work of the more advanced scientists ; 
and he calls upon the universities of England to 
recognize this fact in their training. The sanitary 
work of science has gained popular recognition, 
as in the physical reconstruction of Panama, and 
in the treatment of the sleeping sickness in Africa, 
results of national significance. Many more cap- 
tains of industry might be recognized as patriots if 
they were willing to rule out questionable methods 
of success, or to hold purely commercial rewards 
in abeyance. Why should not the process go on? 
Why should not every man's work be related, con- 
sciously related, to the public welfare? Popular 
recognition of the idea will follow, it cannot pre- 
cede the fact. 

You ask me if a man should choose his busi- 
ness or profession with reference to its capacity 
for public service. I answer, yes, this is an hon- 



THE TRAINING OF THE CITIZEN 235 

orable ground of choice. But under present con- 
ditions I think that it is equally, if not more, 
honorable to compel the business or profession 
which one may have chosen from personal fitness, 
to render just service to the community or nation. 
Just now the demand of patriotism is for the 
enforcement of moral obligation upon, or the 
infusion of moral life into, some unwilling busi- 
nesses and some reluctant professions. 

The last superior qualification for citizenship, 
which I name, may be found in the very honor- 
able ambition to serve the state in the way of 
official duty. This may or may not involve seek- 
ing for an office. A man who is actuated by an 
honorable purpose ought not to be scared by 
popular terms of reproach. One man may hon- 
orably seek the office which another man may 
as honorably decline or even despise. But my 
suggestion at this point does involve a political 
career, a career which I have no hesitancy in 
urging upon some of you ; for in my judgment 
nothing short of a political career will allow you 
to accomplish much politically. Politics is too 
intricate and serious and continuous a business to 
be taken up and put by at will, or at the sugges- 
tion of one's friends, or even on the demand of a 
community. Politics is not really a business at 
all, but an "estate" after the language of^the 



236 PERSONAL POWER 

Prayer Book, and as such " not to be entered 
into unadvisedly or lightly," nor, as must be 
added, temporarily. The chief reason why so 
many political reforms never come to a conclu- 
sion is that those who oppose them know per- 
fectly well that those who urge them are not in 
politics to stay. They have only to wait, in the 
majority of cases, for things to resume their 
natural way, which is also their way. When the 
political reformer really camps upon the enemy's 
ground, he is quite sure to win the field, that 
particular field ; but then, what next ? Where 
has the enemy gone and what is he doing? 

In American politics there is one foe to a 
career, more deadly in some localities than in 
others, but almost everywhere a curse to political 
life, namely, rotation in office. I do not refer to 
the spoils system, which has been so greatly 
curbed by the civil service, but to that foolish 
habit of mind on the part of the American peo- 
ple which considers office-holding as an honor to 
be passed around. A man of some dignity, or 
wealth, or influence wants to be mayor or gov- 
ernor for the distinction. Why should he not 
have a chance ? And as a good many men want 
the position for the same reason, why should not 
the time of service be reduced to the minimum 
so that as many as possible may have the distinc- 



THE TRAINING OF THE CITIZEN 237 

tion ? What plans can be carried out, what pol- 
icy established, what progress made under such 
an arrangement, compared with the results which 
might be expected under more permanent ser- 
vice ? Especially is the loss by this policy most 
seriously felt in municipal government, where the 
contrast with the government of European cities 
is so often taken to our discredit. The latest criti- 
cism which I have chanced to see is from Rear 
Admiral Chadwick : — 

" After such study as I have been able to give 
the subject, I have become convinced that the 
main cause of our failure is in placing city ad- 
ministration in the hands of haphazard short- 
term men. A change to a greater permanency of 
office is our primal need. This necessity is every- 
where else recognized. In England we find the 
actual administration wholly in the hands of tech- 
nical experts. 

" But it is Germany which recognizes in the 
greatest degree the business aspect of municipal 
administration. The Mayor in Germany is a 
Mayor by profession, a highly trained and expe- 
rienced city administrator. He may be called, if 
he acquires a reputation, from city to city." 

This criticism overlooks certain methods to 
which we are bound politically, but I believe that 
the main point of the criticism is right. 



238 PERSONAL POWER 

In spite, however, of some outward conditions 
I am confident that the present times are favor- 
able to the choice of a political career. From first 
to last a man seeking such a career must be hon- 
est, intelligent, courageous, and manifestly unself- 
ish. Given these qualities, there is room as well 
as a demand for college men. The motives of 
such a career are upon you in common with men 
from other colleges. Perhaps the traditions of 
this college are especially urgent. I have had 
occasion to say to you elsewhere that from the 
beginning of the national life Dartmouth has al- 
ways had representation in one or both houses of 
Congress, more frequently in both, as well as in 
other governmental positions. And its represen- 
tatives have been influential. The late Commis- 
sioner of Education, Dr. Harris, remarked that 
his observation of men in Washington had led 
him to consider that the characteristic of public 
men from this college was directive force. I had 
not thought of this characteristic as worthy of 
special notice in the history of the government, 
but upon reflection, I recalled such illustrations 
as Senator Proctor's speech forcing the issue on 
the freedom of Cuba, Mr. Dingley's persistent 
development of the tariff which bears his name, 
Thaddeus Stevens's policy of reconstruction, 
Salmon P. Chase's financial conduct of the Civil 



THE TRAINING OF THE CITIZEN 239 

War, and Mr. Webster's permanent establishment 
of the principle of nationality. Opinions may- 
vary as to the wisdom of some of these efforts 
and the value of their results, but the fact of 
directive force is clear. This force held in honor 
in our traditions may be perpetuated in many 
ways. A political career offers a permanent and, 
as I think, a most timely opportunity for its exer- 
cise. 

I express the hope that the mind of this Col- 
lege will always be hospitable to the claims of 
citizenship. I express the hope that your minds 
may be open to these claims here and now. The 
state cannot exist free, safe, and abiding without 
the devotion and sacrifice of the best. You have 
no right to expect to live in freedom and safety 
upon the devotion and sacrifices of other men. 
Whatever you may accomplish, or may fail to 
accomplish in the furtherance of your personal 
aims and ambitions, may you know in the final 
reckoning with yourselves, that you have given 
something of your best thought and purpose to 
the advancement and perpetuity of the nation. 



IV 

THE TRAINING OF THE ALTRUIST 

ADDRESS AT THE OPENING OF THE COLLEGE 
YEAR, 1908-1909 

I welcome you again, Gentlemen, to your place 
in the honorable succession of college students. 
Year by year, with the natural increase of stu- 
dents, the question inevitably arises, Is there a 
corresponding increase in the intellectual and 
moral valuation of the College ? To those of us 
who watch as well as direct this annual process 
of production, the growing concern is for the 
quality of the product. Whether the number of 
those seeking the higher education throughout 
the country is, or is not, rightly proportioned to 
the whole population, it is evidently sufficient to 
give prominence to other questions than that of 
numbers. What are the motives, the purposes, the 
determinations of those entering our colleges and 
universities? As respects yourselves, how much 
intellectual and moral enthusiasm, how much will 
power, have you brought with you as you enter 
or return to the college ? What capacity can you 
show for quickening and enlargement, what dis- 
position to resist the easy, the unworthy, the 



THE TRAINING OF THE ALTRUIST 241 

commonplace, what resoluteness of desire to ad- 
vance, and in due time to achieve ? These are the 
questions which concern you, man by man, and 
which concern us all in regard to you, not chiefly 
how many of you are here, but being here, what 
personal values are you capable of taking on ? 

The opening addresses of the past years have 
been set to the one purpose of clarifying the 
outlook on college life. A man can go through 
college without really seeing the things which 
are best worth seeing, some of the very things 
indeed which he thought and expected to find 
there. I have been anxious that no man among 
you should go through college blindly, or with 
dim and confused vision, but clearly, having al- 
ways in sight the realities. To go back no fur- 
ther than the year when those of you who are 
seniors entered college, I endeavored to show 
how much was involved in the social influences 
of college life, which were all the while making 
a man more or less of a gentleman, according to 
his understanding and use of them. The year fol- 
lowing I discussed the present claims of scholar- 
ship upon undergraduates, showing you what it 
meant for a college man not to be a scholar at 
least in spirit and intention. And last year I took 
up the very vital relation of a college training to 
the new demands of citizenship. 



242 PERSONAL POWER 

In the address of this year I go farther and 
deeper in my thought, for I am to pass into the 
region of motives. The legitimate and appropriate 
outcome of a college course is personal power. 
What are to be your motives in the accumulation 
of this kind of power? Some of you may recall 
that as I announced the subject of the last year I 
then remarked that it had been in my thought to 
conclude this series of discussions with the con- 
sideration of the question, Are our colleges now 
producing under other forms the equivalent of 
that altruism, which, at the origin of the older 
colleges, found its immediate and most vivid ex- 
pression in religious consecration? The oppor- 
tunity of again addressing you, which I did not 
then anticipate, having returned to me, I make use 
of it to carry out my original intention. Of the 
four essential objects of college training, to train 
the gentleman, to train the scholar, to train the 
citizen (objects already considered), there remains 
for our consideration the highest task of the col- 
lege, namely, that of trying to bring every man 
within its influence under the spirit of altruism 
in some one of its compelling forms. 

As I pass to this last object of college training, 
I recall each of the preceding objects for a word 
of comment suggested by the experience of the 
year, or by the present circumstance. 



THE TRAINING OF THE ALTRUIST 243 

In speaking of the training which produces the 
gentleman I referred particularly to the oppor- 
tunity for its exercise on the field of sport. I now 
wish to congratulate you upon the way in which 
during the last year the college in a collective sense 
played the gentleman. In your action in regard 
to summer baseball you took what you regarded 
as the position of honor at the risk of defeat. The 
fact that your action brought you success does not 
detract from the honor due to you, and in this 
honor none are more deserving of recognition than 
those who generously acted with you to their own 
disadvantage. This college has not seen a finer 
example of undergraduate loyalty than was shown 
by the men who gave their influence and active 
support to the teams from which they had been 
debarred. 

Since urging upon you the special claims of 
scholarship, I have noted a very stimulating sug- 
gestion from John Morley (he will be to us for a 
long time John Morley, not Lord Morley), as to 
the inciting cause of scholarship. "The general 
principles of a study," he said by way of quo- 
tation, in an address at the University of Man- 
chester, "you may learn by books at home — the 
detail, the color, the tone which make it live 
in us all, these you catch from those in whom it 
already lives." Scholarship, that is, Gentlemen, is 



244 PERSONAL POWER 

contagious. You " catch " it from those who have 
it. Only there must be contact. In so far, there- 
fore, as you find men here in whom you see " the 
detail, the color, the tone," of scholarship, pass 
them not by. If in your elections you shun the 
scholar because you are not willing to suffer his 
mental travail, you know at the time that you are 
guilty of intellectual cowardice ; you do not, how- 
ever, quite realize that later you must for so do- 
ing pay the coward's penalty. Believe me, as I 
say to you that nothing lasts like the impact of a 
really great though hard teacher upon the mind 
of a student. Among all the teachers I had in pre- 
paratory, college, or professional training, one man 
abides with me. I refer to Clement Long, the pro- 
fessor of political economy when I was in college, 
the most impersonal man on the faculty. I doubt 
if at any time he knew ten men out of his class- 
room. But he taught men, who cared to know, 
the ways of knowledge, — how to measure facts, 
how to detect errors, how to state the truth. After 
many years I pay this tribute to his memory, in 
gratitude for his abiding influence, and as an illus- 
tration of the permanent value to any man of the 
endurance of hardship under a great teacher. 

It is a fact of some academic significance that 
a national election occurs once in a man's college 
course. The academic value of these elections 



THE TRAINING OF THE ALTRUIST 245 

varies, even in their reminder of the claims of 
citizenship upon college men. But now and then 
an election is peculiarly instructive. I think that 
the coming election is important in the academic 
view from the fact that agitation and contention 
about public issues have reached the stage of 
definition. I can hardly see how the present cam- 
paign can do less than to clarify the public mind. 
I advise you to this end to read the utterances of 
our most intelligent and candid men. You may 
well consider the campaign as something more than 
an interesting or possibly exciting incident in your 
college course. 

I think that you will agree with me, as we now 
take up our immediate subject — The Preserva- 
tion of the Spirit of Altruism in our Colleges — 
that although the subject comes last in the order 
of discussion it instantly claims precedence. Cer- 
tainly it represents our academic obligation, be- 
cause it represents our great academic inherit^ 
ance. The glory of the historic colleges lay not 
so much in their scholarship in the modern sense, 
as in the one fact that they were founded for ends 
which were unmistakably altruistic, — Harvard, 
for " Christ and the Church," Yale, for " public 
employment in the Church and in the Civil State," 
and all the colonial colleges for like aims under 
different terms of consecration. You are familiar 



246 PERSONAL POWER 

with the specific purpose of the founding of our 
own college, a purpose intensified rather than 
concealed by its romantic origin. 

Broadly stated, the terms in which the earlier 
generations expressed their altruistic aims were 
the state and the church. Colleges were founded 
to quicken the motives of men and to increase 
their efficiency in these directions, especially to 
increase their efficiency through the quickening 
of motive. The more modern foundations state 
their objects in the same general terms. Michigan, 
leading the state universities, falls back upon the 
language of the ordinance of 1787 to express its 
motive, — " Religion, morality and knowledge be- 
ing necessary to good government and the happi- 
ness of mankind, schools and the means of edu- 
cation shall forever be encouraged." Many of the 
recent foundations stand more distinctively for 
the advancement of science through research or 
application. But the ultimate end of the higher 
education, — more clearly its end the higher it 
is, — now as formerly, is altruistic. 

And this ultimate end of the higher education 
is entirely congruous with the personal intention 
of those who seek its benefits. Very few men, 
according to my observation, come to college con- 
firmed self-seekers. Some are morally indifferent, 
but they are for the most part just as indifferent 



THE TRAINING OF THE ALTRUIST 247 

to their own best interests as they are to the best 
interests of others. I have noticed that when men 
really come to themselves in college, when, that 
is, they begin to realize their splendid possibili- 
ties, they are much more apt to turn to unselfish 
than to selfish ends. 

Why then, you naturally ask me, if our colleges 
are founded for altruistic ends, and if college men 
as a rule are as well intentioned toward others as 
toward themselves, why should it be, why is it, so 
difficult for us to preserve the spirit of altruism? 
What I have to say further will be in answer to 
this question ; and if in what I may say I seem to 
emphasize the difficulty of the problem, it is that 
I may also emphasize its urgency. 

The first reason which I give for the difficulty 
of maintaining the spirit of altruism in our col- 
leges is the lack, the rather increasing lack, of 
moral maturity in the average undergraduate. I 
do not say the lack of morality, for morality is on 
the whole steadily on the increase in our colleges. 
Nor do I say the lack of a certain moral earnest- 
ness which may at any time find vigorous ex- 
pression in college sentiment. By moral maturity, 
I mean simply the power of a man to assume the 
responsibility for himself. This kind of responsi- 
bility is much more marked in a college as a 
whole than in the individuals who at a given time 



248 PERSONAL POWER 

compose it. Our colleges have made immense gains 
in public opinion, in general behavior, in the col- 
lective self-respect, but the average individual 
student has not shown the same relative gain in 
the power to act for his own best interest, espe- 
cially in the earlier part of his course. For ex- 
ample, the college course is laid out by years, or 
by hours, a minimum number of which is assigned 
to each year. The object of this spacing of col- 
lege work is perfectly evident. Nothing could be 
plainer. Every man knows at the outset that if 
he does not do the minimum work assigned to 
him in an allotted space he must soon or late pay 
the penalty. To change the figure, if one cannot 
keep the college pace, he must fall out of the 
running. And yet there are a great many who 
for no other reason whatever than that of moral 
irresponsibility fail, year by year, of the minimum 
task. And in far too many instances these failures 
continue beyond any reasonable time for self- 
adjustment. The sophomore year — I do not of 
course refer to any sophomore class — the sopho- 
more year represents more than any other year 
arrested development. It represents the most of 
loss and the least of gain among the college years. 
The average sophomore has not yet learned how 
to become an upper-classman. 

To meet this particular expression of moral 



THE TRAINING OF THE ALTRUIST 249 

immaturity in the earlier years, the faculty has 
adopted regulations, of which you have been ap- 
prised, which make it impossible for those who 
neglect their work in this earlier period to make 
up the deficiency by extra hours in the later 
years, at the cost of work assigned to those years. 
The chief object of these regulations is to stimu- 
late moral responsibility at the outset by making 
it certainly and demonstrably evident that the 
least penalty for early neglects and failures is 
overtime for graduation. A further object, as I 
have intimated, is to protect the later years of 
the college course from the effects of the earlier 
waste. It is to be hoped that fewer men will 
find themselves defrauded of advanced courses 
through deficiencies in the courses on which the 
advanced work is conditioned. 

The kind of moral immaturity which I am dis- 
cussing is not due to a decrease in the age of 
college students. There is a general impression 
that college students are younger than formerly. 
Graduates returning to the college speak of its 
youthful appearance. The fact is, the college age 
practically remains unchanged. The graduates 
are simply growing old. Statistics of the Eastern 
colleges, covering a hundred years, carefully 
compiled and computed, show that there has 
been no perceptible variation of age within the 



250 PERSONAL POWER 

century. The age of graduation for the first two 
decades of the nineteenth century was twenty- 
two years and six months for the first decade, 
and twenty-two years and nine months for the 
second decade. The age of graduation for the 
last two decades was twenty-two years and ten 
months for the first, and twenty-two years and 
nine months for the second. The average age 
for the century was exactly that for the last de- 
cade, — twenty-two years and nine months. 

The registrar informs me that for the last three 
classes — 1906, '07, '08 — the age of entrance 
was nineteen years and three months, and of 
graduation twenty-three years. This average is 
slightly above that of the average given for the 
Eastern colleges at the close of the previous cen- 
tury; but I presume that it would be found that 
the like advance had been made since then in all 
the colleges. Practically the college period is 
from nineteen to twenty-three, and this certainly 
is not the period of boyhood, of irresponsible 
thought or activity. It is the period in which one 
may reasonably be expected to come into respon- 
sible relation to himself, to be able to organize 
his daily life, to make calculation for his immedi- 
ate future, to adjust himself to those influences 
under which he has voluntarily, and perhaps with 
some sacrifice, placed himself. 



THE TRAINING OF THE ALTRUIST 251 

It is, therefore, quite unreasonable to refer the 
moral immaturity of this period, so far as it ex- 
ists, to a physical immaturity which no longer 
exists in such degree as to warrant the reference. 
The real causes of this immaturity are many, and 
vary with the individual, with his training, his 
temperament, his associations, but the remedy 
must be in all cases one and the same. The final 
appeal must be made to the individual himself. 
The fact that any one of you has become a 
college man is the sufficient ground for this 
appeal. It is proper for me to say to every one 
of you now entering college that you belong 
here not simply because you have met the tech- 
nical requirements for entrance, but far more 
because it is to be assumed that you are prepared 
to be responsible for yourself. I am not now 
speaking of your responsibility to the college, to 
its traditions, its rules, its definite purposes. I am 
speaking of the very simple but very vital matter 
of your responsibility to and for yourselves, your 
ability to realize in some sufficient way the pur- 
pose for which you are here. Without this sense 
of responsibility all aids and helps to personal 
development are quickly exhausted. After a time 
it becomes an unjustifiable waste to follow the 
receding motives of college students with increas- 
ing incentives, especially with the duplication of 



252 PERSONAL POWER 

the teaching force. If it takes two instructors to 
teach twenty or twenty-five men who do not care 
to study, where one instructor could better teach 
the same number of responsible men, you can 
readily see that irresponsibility is costly. It is too 
costly to be encouraged by providing for it. Col- 
leges were not founded and are not maintained to 
pay in large degree the extra cost of the indif- 
ference or the selfishness of irresponsibility. I 
therefore say to you frankly that the altruism 
which established this college ought to be met by 
a corresponding altruism on your part, an altruism 
which finds its first expression in the generous 
and courageous purpose to relieve the college of 
unnecessary burdens on your behalf. I say cour- 
ageous, as well as generous, because it requires 
courage to meet the distracting and in some cases 
disorganizing influences under which you may 
find yourself. I commend to you a saying of 
Caesar in regard to the conduct of one of his 
commanders in the third campaign in Gaul, in 
extricating the legion under his command from 
a most embarrassing situation. " He took coun- 
sel," Caesar said, "of the valor of his mind." 
When you find yourself in mental or moral dan- 
gers take like counsel. 

I add a word in this connection to the more 
influential men in the upper classes. You have it 



THE TRAINING OF THE ALTRUIST 253 

in your power to raise or to lower the standards 
of the college. Under your influence, sometimes 
personal, sometimes organized, there has been a 
steady elevation of standards at many points. At 
one point you have not reached the proper stand- 
ard. You are not setting the proper pace for 
work. You are not spreading through the college 
an enthusiasm for work. You are content with 
good results where influence demands satisfaction 
only with the best results. To make work popular 
the best men must work. If the best men among 
you played as some of you work, sport would not 
be popular. More is at stake in this regard than 
your personal fortunes, which can be retrieved. 
The standing of the college is in your hands very 
much as the standing of a university is in the 
keeping of its graduate schools. The graduate 
work of a university may or may not influence 
its undergraduate work, but it counts largely in 
the general average. The average law student of 
graduate rank does one half more, if not twice as 
much work, as the average undergraduate, but 
his extra work goes to the credit of the combina- 
tion. The colleges must stand upon their own 
merits, creating within themselves the sentiment 
which will uphold their standards. In your rating 
of men who deserve most from the college be- 
cause they are doing most for it, make a higher 



254 PERSONAL POWER 

place — and let it be known that you are mak- 
ing a higher place — for those who can create 
an enthusiasm for work. 

The second and only other reason which I give 
for the difficulty of maintaining the spirit of al- 
truism in our colleges is the incoming of so many 
callings, attractive to college students, which are 
not in themselves altruistic, and which are dis- 
placing some which were. The reaction in thought 
from one's future occupation is no longer in most 
cases a moral reaction. The college man of to- 
day can think, and plan, and work for his future 
without taking other people with their interests 
and needs into that future. And this for the 
reason, as we all know, that the art of living for 
others is quite dependent upon the opportunity 
for living in others. Keeping this fact in mind, 
we are able to grade the relative altruistic effect 
of the great callings by their necessary contact 
with human necessities, — first, because the con- 
tact is most direct, the ministry, teaching, and 
medicine ; then at a second remove, because con- 
tact comes through the application of moral 
principles, these same professions again, and law 
and politics; then at a third remove, because 
giving contact through material betterments of 
one kind or another, callings like engineering ; 
and then at a further remove still the various 



THE TRAINING OF THE ALTRUIST 255 

businesses which give contact through the use of 
money. Now the tendencies among college men 
are more and more away from the professions 
and callings which give the most direct contact 
with individual life, which stir the sympathies 
and awaken the moral nature, and toward those 
which are more remote in their altruistic effects. 
If a man will so regard it, a factory with its teem- 
ing and throbbing life is as much a place for 
unselfish service as a parish or a school or a hos- 
pital; but how many men do so regard it? Wall 
Street may contribute its tithe to education or 
reform or religion ; indirectly it may give its all 
to those material enterprises which build up the 
country ; but who goes to Wall Street with any 
one of these objects first in mind or nearest his 
heart? When Peter Cooper went to New York, 
a poor lad, he had in mind Cooper Institute. As 
he grew in fortune that object grew. What he 
saw each succeeding year was not more money, 
but the increasing opportunity to be of service 
to the young men and young women of the city, 
an example which shows how rare it is, and yet 
how entirely possible, if not easy, it is to be altru- 
istic through the use of money. I think that the 
time has come for our colleges to idealize in the 
minds of college students some of the popular 
callings which lack ideality. The reaction upon 



256 PERSONAL POWER 

college life from any calling which stands for 
pure secularism is dangerous. It is not the busi- 
ness of a college to intensify power unless it can 
at the same time idealize power. Some of you, 
the majority of you, are turning your backs upon 
the old professions, which, as idealized, stood for 
truth, for justice, for mercy. You are going into 
the callings which are chiefly concerned with the 
making and the use of money, few of which have 
been as yet idealized. You have, therefore, a 
double task before you, first to keep your own 
altruistic motive, such as it may be, and then, 
partly with this end in view, to do all that you 
can to affect the methods, the tone, and the spirit 
of your calling. 

Let me refer you very definitely to certain 
demands which must be met before the money- 
making callings can be put upon the same altru- 
istic basis with the callings which rest upon the 
use of personality, or upon the application of well- 
defined altruistic principles. 

1. Money, dishonestly or unjustly made, does 
a harm to the country, as well as to the indi- 
vidual, which cannot be offset by any compen- 
sating good resulting from its after use. Charity 
cannot make amends for dishonesty. Hence the 
first and most insistent demand of altruism in 
business is honesty, plain, unmistakable honesty. 



THE TRAINING OF THE ALTRUIST 257 

If a man is not prepared to meet this demand or 
if he has failed to meet it, it is idle for him to 
affect altruism. 

2. Money, in the form of capital, is not a neu- 
tral, a non-moral agency, whether used by an 
individual, or by a corporation, or by a trust. 
Capital touches a thousand lives where charity 
touches one, and it touches each life more sensi- 
tively. Capital is very largely the money which is 
paid to the brain and hand of industry, or for the 
material which again is shaped by the same brain 
and hand. The income which reverts to the cap- 
italist, be he an individual or a stockholder, is in 
most of the industries far less than the expendi- 
ture for labor of one sort or another. Hence the 
second demand of altruism in business is that one 
shall keep steadily in mind the human relations 
of money as capital. 

(The capital stock of railroads for the year 1907 
was $6,803,760,000. The amount paid in divi- 
dends was $272,795,000. The amount paid in 
wages was $900,801,000.) 

3. Money, viewed as the means of power or in- 
fluence or luxury, represents the highest kind of 
responsibility. If you propose to make money for 
social or political ends you thereby incur graver 
responsibilities than the capitalist, as the employer 
of labor. The two points at which the conscience 



258 PERSONAL POWER 

of the country is most sensitive, under the pre- 
sent enormous accretion of wealth, are political 
corruption and social extravagance. The political 
corruptionist has learned, or is being taught, his 
lesson. The social spendthrift has yet to learn 
his lesson, and is therefore at present the more 
dangerous person. The vulgar display of riches is 
probably the greatest irritant, if not the most de- 
moralizing force, in the general life of the nation. 
Contrasts between the rich and the poor can be 
borne, to a degree, because it is generally under- 
stood and accepted that poverty may belong to 
the individual as well as to his environment, but 
no nation under the moral standards of to-day 
can long abide undisturbed by the flaunting of 
riches in the face of poverty. I caution you, 
therefore, should any of you inherit or acquire 
wealth, that you have a care to appearances. The 
plain demand of altruism in the social use of 
money is that its possession shall not become a 
stumbling-block causing offense to the life of the 
people. 

4. Money, to be of any considerable value as a 
factor in benevolence, requires interested intelli- 
gence or intelligent interest on the part of its 
possessor. The relatively small amount of money 
given annually for the moral progress of the 
world is due not altogether to the selfishness of 



THE TRAINING OF THE ALTRUIST 259 

the rich, but quite as much to their ignorance. 
Very many of the very rich do not know the 
value of the great civilizing forces, education, art, 
research, remedial agencies, missions. Some one 
has computed that the greater gifts to these ob- 
jects during the past year were made by not more 
than twenty men, but there must be many hun- 
dreds of multi-millionaires in the country. The 
number of private-spirited citizens is enormously 
out of proportion to that of public-spirited citi- 
zens. Perhaps it is as just as it is charitable to 
attribute this vast amount of private spirit to igno- 
rance. The late Mr. E. B. Haskell, for many years 
the proprietor of the " Boston Herald," once told 
me of his acquaintance with a fellow citizen of 
this type whom he met first at Yokohama. Meet- 
ing him later at Athens, as the man seemed to be 
lonely, he asked him if he would like to drive with 
him to Marathon. " Why, yes, but what happened 
at Marathon ? " Thinking that the comparison 
might help him, Mr. Haskell replied that Mara- 
thon was the Gettysburg of Greece. " But what 
happened at Gettysburg? " This man was nearly 
forty years old when the battle of Gettysburg was 
fought, and he was doing business not three hun- 
dred miles away, but so absorbed was he in his 
business that the battle made no impression on 
him. The altruism which teaches a man how to 



260 PERSONAL POWER 

give broadly and wisely begins in knowledge. 
For a man of wealth to offer as an excuse for not 
giving to the great objects of moral progress that 
he is not interested in them, more often reflects 
upon his mind than upon his disposition. His 
shortage is in intelligence. 

I have dwelt upon these demands of altruism 
upon college men who are proposing to them- 
selves business careers, because you ought to 
know in advance what you must do to idealize 
your careers, so that you may keep up the suc- 
cession of devoted men who are the real glory of 
the college and the real security of the country. 
You cannot afford to be non-altruistic. The col- 
lege cannot afford to have you such. The coun- 
try cannot afford to have you such. The true 
outcome of the higher education of the country 
is not moral neutrality. Scholarship cannot evade 
the just claims of altruism and long remain posi- 
tive, virile, and influential. The saying holds 
true as one ascends to the highest objects of pur- 
suit, "No man liveth unto himself. " Living to 
that end alone, or supremely, he ceases to live. 

What motive, then, have you, let me ask as 
my final word, what motive have you, strong 
enough, patient enough, quickening enough, to 
insure the altruistic spirit in the midst of the 
stirring actualities of college life, or in anticipa- 



THE TRAINING OF THE ALTRUIST 261 

tion of your careers? Nothing could be more 
idle than for you to say to another, as your re- 
sponse to this address, " Go to now, let us be 
altruistic, let us change the temper of the col- 
lege, in due time let us try to redeem society 
from its enslaving secularism." Back of any opin- 
ion, or spoken word, or quickened desire, must 
lie the high resolve, and back of the resolve the 
sufficient motive. Most of us, I think, fail to bring 
our better desires and purposes to a conclusion 
through some miscalculation as to the amount of 
motive necessary to their realization. What Mat- 
thew Arnold calls the " governing idea " must 
be greater than the end we propose to reach. It 
takes more than the spirit of liberty to make 
men free, more than the spirit of equality to 
make men equal. So Matthew Arnold points the 
moral in the failure of the French Revolution, 
saying that " however poorly men may have got 
on when their governing idea was 'The fear of 
the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,' they can 
get on even less by the governing idea that 'All 
men are born free and equal.' " I would not have 
you underestimate the amount of motive which 
it takes to accomplish a college course, and to 
put you into right relation to an honorable career. 
Hence the question which I ask you, which I do 
not propose to answer, the most sobering and the 



262 PERSONAL POWER 

most exhilarating question which men in your 
circumstances can entertain, each man for him- 
self — Is my motive, my " governing idea," big 
enough and stanch enough to carry me through 
college? Is it true enough, brave enough, and 
sufficiently satisfying, to enable me to meet here- 
after the temptations of men and the tests of the 
world? 



THE RELIGION OF THE 
EDUCATOR 

ADDRESS IN A LENTEN SERIES ON "VOCATION 
AND RELIGION," AT THE OLD SOUTH CHURCH, 
BOSTON 



THE RELIGION OF THE EDUCATOR 

The most recent biographer of Pascal asks the 
familiar question — "Are men greater than their 
work, or is the reverse true ? " He attempts no 
answer, except such as may be implied in his 
estimate of Pascal, of whom he says that " he is 
one of the small number of those in whom the 
man infinitely transcends his actions." Whatever 
may be our estimate of any man's work in its 
relation to his contemporaries or to the future, 
we cannot suppose that it altogether expresses 
him to himself. And in so great a matter as per- 
sonal religion there must be allowance for expe- 
riences which belong entirely to the man, just 
because he is a man. When Mr. Lincoln went to 
his chamber before going out to the burial of 
his boy, saying to a friend, "I will try to go to 
God with my sorrow," — that was simply a per- 
sonal, a human act : one of those acts common to 
us all, and quite unrelated to what we are doing, 
to whatever may be our vocation. 

But in so far as a man's work is really signifi- 
cant to him, and all the more if it is significant 
to others, it must carry him over into that region 
of thought, if not of action, where by common 



266 PERSONAL POWER 

consent we place religion. No man can under- 
take a great task in a mood so confident or so 
careless, that it will not return to him day by day 
with questions so fundamental and far-reaching 
that he must answer them, if at all, under the 
very motive and through the very principles 
which are in their nature religious. Or if his task 
be undertaken in the religious mood, starting in 
a definite act of consecration, it will surely mod- 
ify his conception of religion and his use of re- 
ligion. 

I think it therefore entirely proper that you 
have asked some of us who are engaged in re- 
presentative kinds of work to speak simply and 
frankly of our religious views and experiences as 
affected by our work. You might with equal 
propriety have extended the list far out into the 
various occupations of men, for work has become 
so highly organized and it affects so clearly the 
conditions and even the destiny of many, that 
the worker, certainly the master worker, may at 
any moment be fitly challenged to declare his 
motive, to justify his method, to show his pur- 
pose, in a word, to avow his religion, or his sub- 
stitute for it. 

You have asked me to speak of the Keligion 
of the Educator. Naturally I must speak first of 
my work. What is education in the sense in 



THE RELIGION OF THE EDUCATOR 267 

which we now have to do with it? Stated in 
large terms, but in terms no larger than are ne- 
cessary, education is the attempt to adjust the 
human mind to its environment. A child is born 
into what we call the world. Is it a new, an un- 
tried world, or is it an old world upon which 
generations have been experimenting? Answer 
this question as you must, and you see at once 
that somebody must begin to adjust the mind of 
the child to the experiences of the world. I say 
must begin to adjust. The training of the uni- 
versity is only the after-part, the final part, of 
this task, — " the transmission/ ' as some one has 
said, " of the highest culture of one generation 
to the ablest youths of the next." 

Or again, this world into which the child is 
born, is it a world of solitary places, or is it a 
world thick with life, full of human incentives 
and distractions ? If the latter, then the mind 
must be organized to accept or to meet in their 
full meaning the social conditions under which 
it must do its work. 

Or again, this world into which the child is 
born, is it a world in bondage to its own past, or 
has it an intellectual future ? If the latter, then 
the mind of to-day must be trained to take part 
in the conquest of that future, to be able to join 
the great comradeship of searchers after truth, 



268 PERSONAL POWER 

truth in the gain of which alone is progress. 
" The highest purpose of the scientist/' says 
the recently elected head of the Carnegie Insti- 
tute, "is to predict. Prediction is the goal of 
science." 

Or yet again, this world into which the child 
is born, is it all? Given the marvelous breadth of 
its experience, the fascinating incitements of its 
social life, the growing means and opportunities 
for intellectual conquests, are these all ? Is this 
world, full and at its best, the complete environ- 
ment of the human mind? Very few would dare 
to affirm that limitation. Education is not based 
on that mighty risk. President Eliot has con- 
tinually protested against any arrangement of 
courses in the lower grades of instruction which 
leads away from, and which, if followed, will for- 
bid the chance of the higher education. The 
protest is sound, and may be carried into all the 
processes of education. It is as uneducational to 
land the human mind in the restrictions of un- 
belief as it is to leave it under the play of super- 
stition. 

This then being the work of education, namely, 
to organize the mind of each succeeding genera- 
tion and to adjust it to its environment, you ask 
me to say what is the religion of an educator, 
meaning by this question, as I understand, what 



THE RELIGION OF THE EDUCATOR 269 

is the moral and spiritual setting of his work. 
Of the religion of any educator as a man it would 
be impertinent for me to speak in behalf of my 
fellows. Judged by the ordinary distinctions, there 
is as great a variety in the religious views of edu- 
cators as in those of any class. In fact, the personal 
equation is here unusually strong, differentiating 
one man from another by sharp contrasts. Never- 
theless you are right in assuming that the reli- 
gion of an educator is affected by his work, and 
to the extent to which it is so affected, his religion 
may be spoken of as his, distinguishable from the 
religion of another man just like him personally, 
who has set himself to a different task. So that 
there has come to be such a thing as academic 
religion. The religious atmosphere of a college 
or university is different from that of the average 
church. Some things do not grow in that atmos- 
phere which thrive elsewhere. Some things thrive 
there which are of feeble growth elsewhere. 

The religion of an educator is conditioned upon 
his sense of values. The great fact which confronts 
him day by day is that of capacity, the capacity 
of the human mind. Contrast his daily experience, 
— it is more than observation, — of human nature 
with that of the judge of a police court, or with 
that of an earnest worker among the devitalized 
classes, somewhere in " the submerged tenth." 



270 PERSONAL POWER 

The educator sees human nature, not at its best, 
but just at that time when the imagination adds 
to fact the increment of promise. The very sug- 
gestions of power are often startling. After 
making full allowance for loss from dullness, and 
for waste from distractions, the mental product 
of the average school is most assuring. Capacity 
is seen from the varying degrees of excellence. 
The average mind is the background for the dis- 
play of the exceptional mind. It takes a wide 
range numerically, usually from fifty or sixty to 
one hundred, to express the difference between 
the mind which is on the whole worth educating, 
worth perhaps the cost of a liberal or technical 
education, and the mind which is so nearly per- 
fect in its working that it seems almost as reli- 
able as a law of nature. It is value of this kind 
which is passing under the constant observation 
of the educator, at first hand if he is an instructor, 
at a second remove if he is an administrator. 
And if he be a man of reflection he sees and 
feels more and more the religious significance 
of the endowment of the human race with rea- 
son, an endowment which carries with it freedom, 
the spirit of inquiry, and the glory of personal 
responsibility in thought and action. 

Keligion would be an ill-balanced thing if left 
to the schools. Religion, as the experience of the 



THE RELIGION OF THE EDUCATOR 271 

human soul, needs all which the soul has to offer 
through reason, and conscience, and heart. It is 
never at its best except as it expresses in some 
form the passion of the soul. But if you trace 
the religious spirit to its source you will find, I 
think, that the quality which it draws from the 
schools, from what I have called academic reli- 
gion, is reverence. Reverence is more than any- 
thing else a habit of the mind. A great many 
people of religious emotion are singularly irrev- 
erent. Contrast the curiosity of the mediaeval 
mind, its sensuous longings after heaven, with the 
inquiry of the modern mind (which accepts mys- 
tery) into the workings of God in nature. Con- 
trast, if you will, the futile but restless question- 
ings about destiny — "Lord are there few that 
be saved ? " — with the untroubled but passionate 
search after truth. The conception of God which 
rises out of the sense of values, is that of Scrip- 
ture: He is a "faithful Creator": "He cannot 
deny himself." Having made the human mind 
and given it inalienable rights, its entire freedom 
is guaranteed by one safeguard, and one only, 
reverence. 

The religion of the educator is set on its prac- 
tical side toward two definite results. The first of 
these results is rightmindedness. Rightminded- 
ness is the department of righteousness in which 



272 PERSONAL POWER 

he does his chief work. Do you mean to say, you 
ask me, that if a man is rightminded he will not 
go wrong? Not at all. The mind of itself is no 
sufficient defense against evil from within or from 
without. We know men of mental rectitude who 
seem powerless under the assaults of appetite and 
passion. But mental rectitude does exclude those 
peculiar sins and vices which have their origin in 
the mind. These are many and dangerous. The 
conversion of the intellect, therefore, is no small 
part of the conversion of the man to righteous- 
ness. How is this effected? Incidentally by the 
training of the mind in connection with non-moral 
acts. The solving of a mathematical problem is 
not a work of righteousness, but it has a morality 
of its own, which if followed may lead the way 
into the actual moralities. The deliverance of the 
mind from easy, indifferent, careless, blundering 
methods, no matter how this deliverance has been 
wrought, enables it to act with moral efficiency 
when confronted by distinctly moral problems. 

But the rightmindedness which we are now con- 
sidering means nothing less than the moral dispo- 
sition of the mind, the habit not simply of clear, 
strong, resolute thinking, but of right thinking. 
The most dangerous thing about education, that 
which every educator fears most, is the perversion 
of power. You see the occasional result when 






THE RELIGION OF THE EDUCATOR 273 

some man of highly trained mind does some ques- 
tionable act, usually in finance or in politics, or 
when he does some flagrantly ungenerous or self- 
ish act, through his personal or corporate relation 
to the public. But the danger is imminent all 
through the process of education, increasing per- 
haps to the last. So that the emphasis falls in- 
creasingly upon rightmindedness. How to keep 
the advancing mind free from conceit and arro- 
gance, humble enough to do its best work ; how 
to keep the mind sane and reasonable under the 
incentives to narrowness, or prejudice, or strife ; 
how to keep the mind free from the dominion of 
the low and sordid desires of avarice and greed, 
or the vulgar passion of vanity as expressed in 
the craving after money for display, or^ from 
the higher and more subtle ambitions which 
point the way to a refined selfishness ; how to 
keep the mind, not the heart alone, accessible to 
the wants of humanity ; how to keep the mind 
unclouded for the open vision of God, — these 
make up the moral problems of the higher edu- 
cation, a part of the every-day work of the tech- 
nical school, the college, and the university. 

What if we fail ? you ask. Suppose that those 
who are under training add to the weaknesses of 
the flesh the sins of the mind, or escaping in 
part these weaknesses still sin through the mind ? 



274 PERSONAL POWER 

What is the relief, the remedy? I know of one 
only. There is one place to which sins of every 
kind bring all sinning men, — the gateway of re- 
pentance. Through that gateway every man must 
pass who would recover his self-respect. But hav- 
ing said this I must go on to say that as the sins 
of the flesh bring a man into the straitness of re- 
pentance, so they bring him also and especially 
under the divine compassion. The touching fact 
everywhere visible in the Old Testament is the 
pity of God for strong men in their moments of 
weakness. The divine treatment as there recorded 
is all summed up in the joyous confession of a 
great soul who sinned greatly, " Thy gentleness 
hath made me great." Jesus knew no distinction 
when once the soul of man uncovered itself for 
forgiveness. It was Saul of Tarsus, whose life 
had been the great illustration of perverted intel- 
lectual power, who said of his life recovered to 
its better action, — " The life which I now live I 
live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved 
me, and gave himself for me." 

The religion of the educator is set on its prac- 
tical side toward another end, equally essential 
with rightmindedness, namely, service. Service is 
a growing word. It is gradually setting some 
souls among us free from the dominion of that 
strong but superficial word, success. It will never 



THE RELIGION OF THE EDUCATOR 275 

supplant the noble word of morality — duty, nor 
the noble word of religion — consecration, but 
it is the word which comes to us most directly 
from the mind of Christ, and which we are be- 
ginning to use as most expressive of the spirit 
and power of Christianity. And, it should be 
added, it is altogether free from cant. But I have 
chosen it as standing for one aim of education, 
because the idea for which it stands comes to us 
weighty with academic traditions. We cannot 
remind ourselves too often that the great call- 
ings which we term the professions, and which 
we identify with schools of learning, gained their 
professional standing not simply because they 
stood for mental attainment and mental skill, 
but because they stood also for service. The min- 
istry, for the furtherance of which so many of 
the earlier colleges were endowed, carries its tra- 
ditions in its name. God forbid that its simple 
meaning should ever be hidden under any term 
of ecclesiasticism. The law was to be ready serv- 
ant of justice, and through medicine men were 
to do the errands of mercy. And these traditions 
abide, so that whenever these professions are 
used primarily for other ends we instinctively 
lower our estimate of those who so use them, if 
not of the professions themselves. 

I have called attention to these traditions be- 



276 PERSONAL POWER 

cause the newer callings which have become, 
or which are becoming ready in other respects to 
take professional standing must be prepared 
to subject themselves to the great moral tests, to 
subscribe, as each calling presents his man, to the 
oath of service. We have the singular contradic- 
tion in the intellectual life of our time, that as the 
tendencies toward commercialism grow stronger 
in some of the established professions, the aca- 
demic spirit is invading the distinctly commercial 
callings and inviting them to accept the moral 
as well as mental discipline which leads to pro- 
fessional standing. 

It is not however chiefly with the professions or 
callings with which education is concerned in its 
insistence upon the spirit of service, but with in- 
dividuals. Moral passion is not often distributed 
among men with any approach to equality. It 
finds room here and there in receptive hearts. 
The principle seems to be that with equal mental 
preparation, some are more susceptible than others 
to the moral impulse, are able or willing to guard 
it with more certain care, and when the time of 
action comes are ready to act more unselfishly. 
It is quite worth while to maintain institutions 
for their product in rare men, men who but for 
these would never have been developed to the 
point where the spiritual impulse could take 



THE RELIGION OF THE EDUCATOR 277 

effect. A great deal of the best work of educa- 
tion must be measured by its results in the few. 
Still the whole force of institutional work, men- 
tal and moral, is set for all. The democracy of 
institutional life is perhaps more strongly marked 
on its moral than on its intellectual side. Cer- 
tainly no mental test can determine in advance 
who is to be accounted the greatest in the realm 
of service. 

It is noticeable that this uncertainty of result, 
or as one may better say, this widening of moral 
possibilities, has increased with the opening of 
academic life into the life of the world. The 
solicitations of the world are not temptations to 
every soul. To some they are appeals and plead- 
ings. Now and then a man more accustomed to 
books than to men hears the call of God where 
men are. And it is also noticeable that with the 
accomplishment in so large degree of the work 
of criticism, especially in the field of religion, 
the moral and spiritual instincts of young men 
are once more stirring toward action. I shall be 
surprised if within the next decade there is not 
a sufficient reinforcement of the church, for its 
greater and more necessitous service, from the 
awakening spiritual life in our colleges and uni- 
versities. 

But all predictions or even observations aside, 



278 PERSONAL POWER 

no one questions the necessity for the incoming 
of strong spiritual motives as the intellectual life 
draws near to action. No educator can allow 
himself to be indifferent to the spirit which a 
man takes with him who enters the world by way 
of the school. He recognizes it as a part of the 
business of modern education, if not his personal 
business, to uncover the deeper ways of the world 
to those who are to enter it, to show them how 
the stronger and finer ambitions can there be 
satisfied, to encourage in them a reasonable and 
a resolute faith in the practicability of righteous- 
ness. Not all men in the academic service can 
do this. Some can do better work in other, and 
to them more familiar ways. But some men must 
do this very thing as an essential part of the 
business of modern education. We must have a 
clearer, better defined and more effective moral 
connection between our higher institutions of 
learning and the world. That connection can 
only be made with certainty and efficiency 
through the spirit of service. You cannot say to 
a man, " Do this," or " Do that." You can make 
it necessary for him, through the urgencies of 
his own spirit, to serve the world. Inspiration, 
in other words, is as legitimate a part of educa- 
tion as instruction. Among the critics, scholars, 
teachers, administrators who make up the educa- 



THE RELIGION OF THE EDUCATOR 279 

tional force of a great institution there must be 
some man of sufficient inspirational power to 
keep open the moral connection with the world. 
He may be, in one and the same person, the critic, 
or the scholar, or the teacher, or the administra- 
tor. There is no choice or advantage of one de- 
partment, or function, or place above another. 
Any man, who can fully satisfy any educational 
position which he may occupy, may add to it if 
he can, moral inspiration. The condition, how- 
ever, to which I have referred is inexorable. 
Moral inspiration can never come from a man 
who is not able to do his own first and great 
duty, and to do it well. From such an one inspi- 
ration flattens into exhortation. 

In answering your question thus far about the 
religion of the educator, I have asked you to 
note upon what it is that his religion is con- 
ditioned, — namely, upon his sense of values as 
revealed to him in the capacity of the human 
mind: and I have asked you also to note the 
particular ends toward which it is, and must be 
set, namely, rightmindedness as a part of right- 
eousness, and service, as alone satisfying the 
public reason for education. 

You naturally go farther and ask me for the 
content of the religious faith of an educator. I 
suppose that you do not mean to ask what are his 



280 PERSONAL POWER 

theological holdings, for we do not express our- 
selves to-day in theological as much as in reli- 
gious terms. This fact means that we have changed 
the emphasis from the content of faith to the 
tone of faith. The question in the popular mind 
in regard to any man in whom it is interested re- 
ligiously is not, so much as formerly, what he be- 
lieves, but much more than formerly, how he 
believes. Formerly the distinction was, Is a man 
orthodox or heterodox? To-day the distinction 
is, — Is a man an optimist or a pessimist? Our 
religious beliefs and denials are experienced in 
shades and colors rather than in sharp and rigid 
outlines. And this means that we believe, or 
doubt, or deny, much more according to our ex- 
perience of the world than according to logic. 

This distinction is so important in enabling 
me to express the religious faith of the educator, 
that I must give you brief illustrations of it. 

Here is a note of pessimism so deep and so 
pathetic that it has held the ear of the world for 
centuries. " Then I returned and saw all the op- 
pressions that are done under the sun : and be- 
hold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they 
had no comforter ; and on the side of their op- 
pressors there was power ; but they had no com- 
forter. Wherefore I praised the dead which are 
already dead more than the living which are yet 



THE RELIGION OF THE EDUCATOR 281 

alive ; yea, better than them both, him which hath 
not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that 
is done under the sun." What is modern pessim- 
ism, of the East or of the West, but a faint echo 
of this ancient plaint? 

Or take the word of this same old-time preacher, 
as he styles himself, as in another mood he looks 
out upon nature and takes account of the glori- 
ous contradiction in his view, as it also includes 
man. " He hath made everything beautiful in 
its time : also he hath set eternity in their heart : 
yet so that man cannot find out the work that 
God hath done from the beginning even to the 
end." In what other words can we express our 
joy in the changing beauty of nature, stilled it 
may be for the moment by the deep sense of the 
eternal in ourselves, and solemnized by the yet 
deeper sense of the unfathomable mysteries in 
which we think and work? What better reflec- 
tion have we of the religious alternatives of the 
modern mind as it surrenders itself to the joys 
of the old Greek in the outer world, to be sud- 
denly recalled to the old Hebrew's sense of eter- 
nity in the inner man ? 

Or once more, take the one great illustration 
of pure christian optimism, born out of the certain 
and joyous experience of the soul. "Beloved, 
now are we the children of God. And it is not 



282 PERSONAL POWER 

yet made manifest what we shall be. We know 
that if he shall be manifested we shall be like 
him ; for we shall see him even as he is." 

What now is the faith of the educator accord- 
ing to his experience of the world? Does he come 
up out of his work with the great christian hold- 
ings of faith ? Yes, I think that he does, not as 
declared in the creeds, but as held in convictions. 
God is too near to one, who works in the mind 
of man, to be overlooked. Sin is too imminent, 
in view of the perversions of intellectual and 
moral power, to be ignored or made light of. 
The world is too needy, and needs so much the 
best which any man has to give, and to have it 
given in the best way, that one does not dare to 
trust the well- trained and well-motived life to any 
other than that Master of human service, who 
through service and sacrifice has set himself to 
the task of saving and satisfying this world. If 
we take Christianity, not according to its diver- 
gent creeds, but according to its great concep- 
tions which unify and inspire, its conceptions of 
God, of immortality, of the worth of man and of 
his danger, of the personality of Jesus in his re- 
lation to the sin of men and to the progress of 
the world, you will have, I think, an overwhelm- 
ing consensus of religious faith among educators, 
as we know them, in beliefs which are distinctly 






THE RELIGION OF THE EDUCATOR 283 

christian. But it is when you pass from the con- 
tent of religious faith to its tone, that you find in 
yet clearer distinction the tone of a sane chris- 
tian optimism. 

I must remind you yet again that I am speak- 
ing of the faith of the educator as such. The 
personal element may enter into the faith of any 
worker to change its tone. Temperament, or per- 
sonal experience, or some overmastering event in 
life, or some peculiar inheritance in faith itself 
may modify or altogether neutralize the effect 
of work upon faith. But the work of education 
leads the way as surely as any known work, into 
the certainty and gladness of faith. It must 
needs be so. It is work in mind and in truth, the 
two great realities. The proportion therefore of 
the permanent in it is very great. Something 
of the work goes over into character, something 
of it goes into increase of knowledge, some- 
thing of it goes into the general progress of the 
world, and something is put on deposit, enlarg- 
ing the foundation of institutions. Nothing save 
the church, — and this can rarely be said of indi- 
vidual churches, — nothing is so permanent as 
the great foundations of learning. And as the 
centuries increase upon them they bear increas- 
ing testimony to the glorious optimism of their 
work. 



284 



PERSONAL POWER 



The general subject, under which this address 
falls, is Vocation and Religion. Vocation is a 
man's elect work, not that which comes upon 
him by compulsion, except it be the compulsion 
of a great choice. Whoever undertakes the work 
of education in this spirit may not only carry it 
on in the optimism of religious faith, but when 
he lays it down, he may leave it with the ancient 
prayer of an unfaltering hope upon his lips, 
" Establish thou the work of our hands upon us, 
yea, the work of our hands establish thou it." 



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